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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.

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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.

Related link

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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

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Posted by Simon on December 20, 2021

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A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh (1934)

Brenda and Tony

Five or six years ago Brenda Rex married Tony Last. She is Lord St Cloud’s daughter, ‘very fair, [with an] underwater look’. They lived in a flat in London till Tony’s father died two years later, and left him an impressive Victorian country house, Hetton, loving described in a page of purple prose. But what with the upkeep of the big draughty place and wages for the fifteen or so servants (including the butler, Ambrose), they don’t have much disposable income and can’t afford to go up to London very often.

They have a simply adorable little boy, John Andrew, who has a tut-tutting nanny. One of the other servants is a riding master, Ben Hacket, who’s teaching the boy how ride and jump fences on his pony, Thunderclap (and in a comic recurring theme, also exposing the boy to rather fruity phrases which nanny considers wholly inappropriate).

Enter John Beaver

One weekend, John Beaver, a non-descript young man comes to stay. He has no money and no title and no relatives. One night when Tony was up in town he found himself in the bar of his club, Bratts, almost alone except for this Beaver fellah, and they had a few drinks and then dinner and Tony, out of politeness, asked him to come down to stay at the country place. Never dreamed he would. But here he was, having caught the train down.

There are no other guests so he and Brenda put a brave face on entertaining the young man, carefully assigning him the coldest spare bedroom (Sir Galahad; with Victorian heaviness, all the bedrooms are named after characters from the King Arthur stories) with the most uncomfortable bed, in a bid to get rid of him asap.

During the day Tony makes excuses to go out on estate business, see to his tenants, pop into the local town, go to church on Sunday morning and generally avoid young Beaver. So it falls to Brenda to engage him in conversation and try to keep him entertained.

At first, when Beaver has gone to dress for dinner or whatever, when she is alone with Tony, she complains about how tiresome he is. But Beaver is used to staying at country places, he’s the non-descript, unimportant chaps who makes up the numbers at countless society parties and weekends, and so he puts on a good display of conversation and pretends to be interested in the house and ends up staying an extra night. By the time he leaves on Monday morning Brenda is describing him as quite tolerable, you know.

Their affair begins

Thus begins the slow slide by which Brenda Last commences an adulterous affair with bland John Beaver, to her own surprise, the amazement of her sister, Marjorie, and the delight of gossip-starved wider society.

(Brenda’s sister, Marjorie is married to Allan, ‘the prospective Conservative candidate for a South London constituency of strong Labour sympathies’. They are hard up, too hard up to afford a baby, but popular. They live in a little house in the neighbourhood of Portman Square, very convenient for Paddington Station and they own a Pekingese dog named Djinn, who various other characters find objectionable.)

John’s backstory

John’s backstory is that his father is dead and he was laid off from the one job he’s ever had, in an advertising company, during the Slump. Now he lives with his mother, Mrs Beaver, in her small house in Sussex Gardens. He calls her ‘mumsy’. She runs a small business providing furnishings for the London homes of the rich. He has the dark little sitting-room (on the ground floor, behind the dining-room) and his own telephone. His clothes are looked after by an elderly parlourmaid.

Beaver has one distinction – he is a universal backstop guest for posh parties. If a society hostess is arranging a smart dinner party and a male guest lets her down at the last minute, John is the man she calls. Thus John spends the early part of every evening sitting beside his phone, waiting for a call, and is rarely disappointed. Someone, somewhere, needs a presentable man at short notice and, from his base in Sussex Gardens, he can walk or catch a cab to be with his hostess in as little as fifteen minutes, sometimes arriving just as the guests are going in to dine, sometimes after they’ve completed their first course.

Tony the model squire

Tony Last’s distinguishing feature is his immense love for his rambling old house, Hetton, and the plans continually revolving round his head of how to renovate and improve it. He attends church every Sunday (sitting in the family box pew his father had specially built, which is big enough to hold an armchair!), chats with the rather gaga vicar (‘the Reverend Tendril’) after the service, makes friendly conversation with the villagers, many of whom are his tenants. He is a sentimentalised vision of the modern squire, hard up in the modern way, forced to scrimp and save, but benevolently patriarchal and well meaning. His quiet, rural integrity stands in time-honoured opposition to the shallow, immoral infidelities represented by the big bad city.

Familiar plot

In fact the outline of the plot is time-honoured and traditional. Young society girl marries nice chap with house in country, moves to country, produces son and heir, becomes bored, then very bored, then has fling with first halfway eligible man who crosses her path.

Obviously there’s lots of precisely imagined and described detail, both of the affair and the London high society it takes place amongst. One of the striking things for a modern reader is how Brenda and Beaver make no attempt to hide their affair. They attend the usual round of high society parties so that within days their names are being bandied about over dinner party tables and morning phone calls. Very quickly everyone knows they’re having an affair, everyone except poor Tony.

Waugh indulges in a little editorialising, repeating the idea floated in Vile Bodies that people read gossip columns, and gossip generally, in order live fuller lives via other people. The key word is ‘vicariously’, which occurs here and in the similar passage in Bodies:

The morning telephone buzzed with news of her; even people with whom she had the barest acquaintance were delighted to relate that they had seen her and Beaver the evening before at a restaurant or cinema. It had been an autumn of very sparse and meagre romance; only the most obvious people had parted or come together, and Brenda was filling a want long felt by those whose simple, vicarious pleasure it was to discuss the subject in bed over the telephone. (p.57)

Gossip is a key part of Waugh’s fiction. Waugh is the poet laureate of gossip.

A love nest in London

The affair takes a step up when Brenda persuades Tony that she needs a little flat in town, a pied a terre, an idea suggested by Mrs Beaver who is converting a Victorian house into stylish bedsits containing a bedroom and ensuite bathroom. Tony reluctantly lets Brenda rent one and then accedes to her sudden desire to spend rather a lot of time at it. For a front she claims to want to take an adult degree in economics, it will help her manage accounts at Hetton. Tony innocently believes this obvious lie.

For his part, John is chuffed to be treated with new respect by the polite society which he has previously only been on the fringes of.

And Beaver, for the first time in his life, found himself a person of interest and, almost, of consequence. Women studied him with a new scrutiny, wondering what they had missed in him; men treated him as an equal, even as a successful fellow competitor. ‘How on earth has he got away with it?’ they may have asked themselves, but now, when he came into Bratt’s, they made room for him at the bar and said, ‘Well, old boy, how about one?’ (p.58)

So the plot – bored married woman has affair – may be pretty run of the mill, the pleasure comes from: Waugh’s beautiful style; a thousand and one acute observations about the people and posh lifestyles he’s describing; and, more subtly, the precise way Waugh conceives and records the slow change in Brenda’s attitude and in the climate of her marriage. If you want to drag ‘morality’ into literature, then it is a moral decline, but recorded, annotated, measured, in psychological details.

‘Princess’ Abdul Akbar

Brenda stays away from Hetton more and more. When she comes back to Hetton Tony is pitifully glad to see her. Our sympathies harden against Brenda when she conspires to palm off a free single woman on Tony. With atrocious misunderstanding of her husband, she thinks if she can push him into having an affair, then they’ll be morally equal.

So Brenda comes down to Hetton with two posh society friends and Mrs Beaver, who is now offering to do up the main rooms in the house (to Tony’s dismay). But the point of the visit is an extended comic passage about a ‘Princess’ Abdul Akbar (real name Jenny), a heavily made-up and over-scented vamp who Brenda and the other women take every opportunity to leave alone with Tony, as she flirts with him, gives him a silly nickname, hints at her tragic past, declares she simply loves the house and in every way tries to tempt him into an affair which will then justify Brenda’s brazen, heartless adultery. But it is a comic fail. They’ve all underestimated Tony’s good, true, faithful heart.

The Shameless Blonde

Tony’s best friend, Jock Grant-Menzies, comes for the weekend bringing his latest girlfriend, a thoroughly modern divorcée who the two men have nicknamed ‘the shameless blonde’. Her actual name is Mrs Rattery and she was American by origin but is now thoroughly internationalised, having lived for years in the best hotels in capital cities around the world. She turns out to be supremely capable and flies in her own plane to Hetton, which she lands in the park, climbing out, tall and limber in her flying outfit, the model of a 1930s, Art Deco, über-woman.

Next day is the big fox hunt which young John Andrew has been excitedly looking forward to for months. Waugh describes the buildup and hunt with the same thoroughness and accuracy that he brings to any subject if he sets his mind to it (compare the numerous factual descriptions in his travel books). For me, fox hunting doesn’t become any the less ludicrous the more the traditions and rituals surrounding it, are described. Most Londoners get more foxes in their gardens than the Pigstanton Hunt gets in this novel. But it is an important symbol of the life of the country squire, that sense of deep English heritage which also informs, say, the novels of Saki or Siegfried Sassoon.

Death of John Andrew

Half way through the book comes its devastating shock. Little John Andrew is really enjoying the hunt but his father made Ben promise to bring him back before 1pm and as 1 approaches, despite John’s whines to be allowed to ride some more, Ben tells him they must return.

All morning there have, of course, been numerous other riders and horses. The most notable was Miss Ripon riding a very difficult, temperamental bay horse her father has been trying to get rid of for years. She’s packed in following the hunt and joins them on the ride along the road back to the stables, with John to her right and Ben on the outside. At a bend in the lane one of the country buses unexpectedly appears coming the other way but slows right down and pulls over. Bit nerve-making but OK. But, alas, Miss Tendril, the vicar’s niece, has come up behind the horses on her fashionable motor bike and at that precise moment it backfires with a terrific, loud report.

Miss Ripon’s horse starts and panics, rearing sideways and knocking John Andrew off his mount and onto the tarmac road. Ben yells at Miss Ripon to whip her horse, which she does and it regains focus and shoots off down the road. But not before it lashes out with a powerful rear hoof which connects with John Andrew’s head and sends him flying into the ditch where he lies perfectly still. He is killed instantly.

The impact of John’s death

In his previous novels Waugh had deliberately underplayed the deaths of various characters, they happened peripherally, that was a deliberate tactic in creating the sense of the brittle, heartless high society he wanted to portray.

Here, it is the opposite. We arrive back at Hetton to find Tony has been informed of his son’s abrupt, tragic and quite meaningless death. Like the stiff upper lip English gent he is (or fancies he is, or Waugh fancies he is) he is dealing capably with all the social obligations and arrangements which a death in the family entails. The workmen redecorating the drawing room have been sent home. Mr Tendril the vicar pays a sombre visit. With typical empath and selflessness, Tony is most concerned about Miss Ripon who was in a terribly emotional state and kept blaming herself. Ben arrives and gives his side of the story. Jock arrives and is with Tony alone.

Everybody agrees it was nobody’s fault, no one is to blame. This phrase is echoed again and again by various characters and with each iteration becomes more meaningless. It is a cruel, shocking insight into a universe with absolutely no purpose or concern for anybody.

Tony is most worried who will tell Brenda. He’s phoned her at her London flat umpteen times but no reply. Jock, who, like everyone else, knows about Brenda’s affair with Beaver, volunteers to go to London and tell her. Initially Mrs Rattan, the  brisk, effective American divorcée, offers to fly them both up to London but something in Tony’s tone makes her change her mind. It is notable that, out of all the characters, it is the only non-English person, the American divorcée, who grasps just how deeply Tony is in shock, that he is on the verge of going completely to pieces. So she says she will stay with him, overriding all his objections, meaning Jock will take the train up to London. And stay she does during the long empty afternoon of his newly desolate life, trying to distract him with numerous different card games. The understated power of this passage brought tears to my eyes.

Brenda’s reaction

Meanwhile, there is another scene designed to shock. Jock makes it to London, knocks on the door of Brenda’s flat, only for her neighbour to open, none other than the vampish, self-dramatising ‘Princess’ Abdul Akbar’. She knows where Brenda is, at Polly Cockpurse’s place where a gaggle of posh ladies are having their fortunes read by the latest fashionable fortune reader. When Brenda emerges from her session she sees from her friends’ faces that something bad has happened and she rushes downstairs to see Jock. He tells her to prepare herself and then tells her that John is dead.

Brenda goes white and has to sit down. But as Jock begins to tell the details of the death, about the hunt and the horse, Brenda becomes confused, perplexed – and then realises Jock isn’t talking about John Beaver, he is referring to her son, John Andrew. At which point the novel screeches off its hinges into a terrible moment of moral indictment. In that split second of realisation, Brenda is relieved that it was only her son who was killed, not her adulterous lover.

[Jock] ‘I’ve been down at Hetton since the week-end.’
[Brenda] ‘Hetton?’
‘Don’t you remember? John was going hunting to-day.’
She frowned, not at once taking in what he was saying. ‘John… John Andrew… I… oh, thank God…’ Then she burst into tears.
She wept helplessly, turning round in the chair and pressing her forehead against its gilt back. (p.118)

God. Has any fictional character ever been so totally skewered? She is relieved to learn that it’s only her son who’s died. And realises it in the same moment, realises what a terrible terrible thing that is to have thought and felt.

Jock drives Brenda back to her flat, sits while she packs her things in shock, drives her to the station to catch the train down to Hetton. She makes a feeble attempt to excuse herself, saying she didn’t know what she was saying. Jock says bluntly: ‘You know what you said.’ He drives to his club. He stands at the bar saying nothing to anyone.

A few days later, when Jock goes down to Hetton to keep Tony company, he listens as Tony explains why Brenda told him she had to get away from the house, how deeply upset she must be, how he wishes he could help her. Jock says nothing. He doesn’t tell anyone what she said. God, the buttoned-up, repressed, tight-lippedness of these people.

Brenda and Tony attend the inquest. Afterwards she moves slowly, mechanically. Sits in a daze. Stares out the window. This is really beautifully conveyed, her sleep-walking dazedness. She tells Tony it’s all over, she must get away. He doesn’t understand. Not till she writes him a letter from back in London saying she is in love with John Beaver and wants a divorce. Tony is incredulous. He… he trusted her.

The divorce

An entire chapter is devoted to a detailed description of the absurd lengths one had to go to in the 1930s to gain a divorce. Because Tony is a gentleman he ‘does the right thing’ which is arrange to be the guilty party. He contacts a divorce solicitors who organise the usual procedure, which is that he goes to a hotel somewhere (he chooses Brighton) with a woman of his choice (Jock and Tony give this a lot of thought and then go visit a dingy ‘nightclub’ they’d visited one very drunk night earlier in the story, and alight on the blowsy prostitute, Milly). They explain the deal to Milly, explaining it will be purely a business transaction, no sex required. When Milly asks if she can bring her 8-year-old daughter, Winnie, Tony briskly refuses. Nonetheless, when Milly arrives at the station to meet Tony for the train to Brighton a few days later, she has brought Winnie who proves to be a world class pain in the butt during the following tortuous weekend.

So they catch a train together to Brighton, accompanied at a distance by the two private detectives hired by the divorce solicitors who will testify to Tony’s adultery in court and so win the divorce. Winnie keeps whining, wanting ‘ices’ and insists on being taken to see the sea despite there being a howling rainstorm. Tony outrages his detectives’ sense of professional propriety by socialising with them, buying them drinks and then cocking up the all-important ‘morning after’ scene by having such an early breakfast in the hotel restaurant with whining Winnie that it is an effort to then put a dressing gown on (over his other clothes) and clamber into a big double bed with Milly (who’s tired and grumpy) so they can be served by hotel staff who will later testify to finding them in bed together etc.

An unpleasant obligation, required by his impeccable good manners and sense of responsibility, is finally completed.

Payback

Back in London Tony is visited by Brenda’s elder brother, Reggie, an obese archaeologist. At this point it gets nasty.

It should probably be pointed out that Waugh himself was betrayed by his first wife and went through a very painful divorce. They were married for precisely one year before she revealed she was having an affair with a good friend of both of theirs. It is not difficult to see the passage that follows, this scene with Brenda’s adipose brother Reggie, as cold-blooded revenge. Waugh shows very clearly how Tony’s honesty and fidelity and good manners are systematically traduced by every member of her family and all her friends.

The humiliating ordeal he put himself through in Brighton and his offer of £500 a year settlement are thrown back in his face as bullyingly insufficient. The brother, Reggie, tells Tony that Brenda wants at least £2,000 a year. Lots of relatives think Tony is behaving badly by refusing to take Brenda back. Give it a year, suggests Marjorie, and she’ll get over Beaver and be ready to come back. Tony should wait. He should be forgiving.

In a cold fury at Reggie’s demands Tony phones Brenda and asks if this is really what she wants. £2,000 a year. She admits that John Beaver put her up to it. Beaver’s pointed out they’ll both be quite hard up so will need Tony’s money to live on. Tony asks her if she understands that this will mean he’ll have to sell Hetton. She stumbles and hesitates and starts crying and tells him to stop bullying her, but then admits, yes, she knew.

That’s all he needed to know. He puts the phone down and strides back into the restaurant where Reggie is waiting. And tells him he can fuck off. He’s cancelling the divorce, the whole trip to Brighton was a sham and he has witnesses to prove it. He’s not going to divorce Brenda or give her a penny. Tough. He gets up and walks out. The reader is meant to be on their feet, cheering. The worm has finally turned. After a long narrative of being betrayed, lied to and laughed at behind his back, Tony rejects the whole stinking lot of them.

On a journey

The final quarter of the novel presents another surprise. The scene has moved utterly from England. We find Tony aboard a ship heading for South America (!). Why? How?

Avoiding his former clubs, Bratts and Brown’s, for fear of running into Beaver or indeed anyone he knows, Tony had taken to frequenting the third club he’s a member of, the Greville Club. This is a more highbrow, donnish place, and it is here that he meets the short, brown figure of Dr Messinger. Tony had been leafing through travel brochures toying with going on a long journey with no particular idea where. Over lunch Dr Messinger tells him about his ongoing quest for a lost Shining City in the Amazon, which he has various maps and native accounts of. By the end of lunch Tony has agreed to accompany him. Why not?

And so there follows a long beautifully described sea voyage from the cold grey English Channel through the big waves of the Atlantic and on to the azure seas of the Caribbean. Descriptions of fellow passengers and a brief flirtation with the 18-year-old daughter of an eminent Trinidadian family.

Then he arrives at a port on the coast of South America, rendezvous with Messinger and they set off upriver into Amazonia with a team of eight blacks, chugging upstream in a shallow boat for ten days. At this point they leave the boat and make a stash of supplies – base camp – before walking to a nearby Indian village. Here they recruit a dozen or so men and women to carry their supplies for a week or more further into the interior. These people are from the Macushi tribe. They go so far but , after a week’s tramping, refuse to go further because it means crossing into Pie-Wie territory. Dr Messinger hopes these remote Pie-Wie people will be able to guide them to the Lost City.

Waugh himself went on a three-month long expedition into Amazonia which he described in Ninety-Two Days. Much of the detail of Tony and Messinger’s trip is based on that, not least a) descriptions of the umpteen different type of fly, mosquito, jiggers and even vampire bats which assail them during the day and are a serious menace by night and b) precise descriptions of the black crew on the boat and then the indigenous Indian porters, silent, self-contained movements, their  unconquerable fear of the other tribe.

Vivid descriptions of each stage of the Amazon journey are juxtaposed with developments back in London, namely the rather inevitable falling out of the adulterous lovers Brenda and John. Beaver tires of Brenda’s clinginess, Brenda, with no support from Tony, becomes desperate for money, lowers herself to ask for a job at Mrs Beaver’s shop and is mortified at being turned down.

Final developments

To summarise, beneath the impressively authentic details of Amazonian natives and fauna, key things happen:

1. Tony comes down with fever – Messinger nurses him for days.

2. Their food runs low and Messinger is forced to leave feverish, hallucinating Tony and set off for help, in the canoe, down the river. Unfortunately, he is swept over a waterfall and drowned.

3. Tony’s pitiful weakness is powerfully described. The way he tries to fill the empty lantern with paraffin but is so weak he knocks the can over and listens helplessly as the precious liquid gouts out into the soil, weeping helplessly, was very affecting.

4. The scene cuts to some days later when an exhausted, fever-ridden, delirious Tony stumbles out of the jungle. Indians spot him and take him, shambling, covered in bites and rashes and cuts, to the only educated man in the area, a Mr Todd.

The bleak ending

Mr Todd nurses Tony slowly back to health, but when Tony mentions it is time for him to leave, Mr Todd makes excuses. Things take a sinister turn. Mr Todd has a collection of mouldy, ant-eaten old books, including a complete set of Charles Dickens. He asks Tony to read to him for a few hours every afternoon. He used to have another man staying with him who did this. He shows Tony the poor wretch’s grave. Slowly Tony realises the other man was stuck there, trapped, a slave, forced to read Dickens in exchange for food. He realises Todd intends to keep him there in the same way, nursing him, feeding him, but never letting him go.

Tony is stuck because Mr Todd’s shack is so isolated. He lives off food provided to him by the native Indians and a few items of livestock. For scores of miles in every direction there is only barren savannah where Tony would starve and parch to death, or the impenetrable rainforest he stumbled out of. If he tried to escape in either direction it would be without food or water and so, as Tony realises, he would die within days. And so he is forced to stay

One day a European explorer stumbles into the clearing. Todd makes sure he is never alone with Tony but before the explorer continues on his way, Tony slips him a note saying he is alive and well. The explorer disappears back into the forest and Tony spends months and months in hope his message will percolate down to the coast and someone will come looking for him.

One afternoon Mr Todd tells Tony the villagers are having a feast, it might interest him to observe and take part. So they spend the evening at the little local village eating cooked meat and drinking generously from the home brewed alcohol. Tony wakes with a terrible hangover to discover his watch has gone from his wrist. Mr Todd comes into his room in the shack and informs him that a search party of Europeans had come looking for him. The native feast was a ruse to drug Tony and hide him out of the way so that when the search party arrived, Mr Todd was able to tell them that Tony had, alas, perished, to show them the grave of Tony’s predecessor saying it contained Tony, and to give them Tony’s watch as proof. Thus they were sent away with bearing a conclusive account of Tony’s sad death in a faraway country back to all his friends and family in England.

Mr Todd calmly explains all this to Tony and it is a sign of Waugh’s tremendous technique that he doesn’t give us Tony’s reaction at all. We don’t see him, hear him utter a word, share his thoughts, there is no description of his response to the fact that he is now doomed to spend the rest of his life, stuck in a crappy clearing in the middle of nowhere, eating the same awful subsistence food day after day, and forced, in order to survive, to read the complete works of Charles Dickens to a madman.

Coda

With new of Tony’s death Hetton passes to his nearest relatives, the ‘poor Lasts’, a cadet branch of the family we had heard about a few times earlier in the narrative. They are decent people but have to downsize the domestic staff and energetically set about expanding the farming operation, specially of lucrative silver foxes, bred for their fur.

Brenda, as a widow, is free to marry. John Beaver had, some time earlier, heartlessly abandoned her in order to accompany his mother on a business trip to America. From this nadir of her fortunes, she manages to recover herself and brings off the coup of marrying Tony’s old friend Jock Grant-Menzies. It speaks volumes about both of them that Jock notoriously heard her first reaction when told that ‘John’ had died, and so fully knows what a heartless , selfish bitch she is – and yet goes ahead with the marriage.

Author’s message

The world is cruel and pointless. Human life, by itself, is meaningless.

For a month now [Tony] had lived in a world suddenly bereft of order; it was as though the whole reasonable and decent constitution of things, the sum of all he had experienced or learned to expect, were an inconspicuous, inconsiderable object mislaid somewhere on the dressing table; no outrageous circumstance in which he found himself, no new, mad thing brought to his notice, could add a jot to the all-encompassing chaos that shrieked about his ears.

Religion is rarely mentioned in the book, none of the characters take it seriously, it only features in the form of the slightly gaga comedy vicar, with his comic name, Mr Tendril. And yet anyone who knows that Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930, can sense that the more he emphasises the cruel, amoral heartlessness of the world, the more this vision of despair cries out for a countervailing force, for a force which will restore meaning and purpose and morality to the shabby lives of these broken puppets. Without mentioning Catholicism once, it can be interpreted as a deeply religious book.

Waugh’s way with words

London:

Dawn broke in London, clear and sweet, dove grey and honey, with promise of good weather; the lamps in the streets paled and disappeared; the empty streets ran with water, and the rising sun caught it as it bubbled round the hydrants; the men in overalls swung the nozzles of their hoses from side to side and the water jetted and cascaded in a sparkle of light. (p.190)

The day of the inquest:

A day of fitful sunshine and blustering wind; white and grey clouds were scarcely moving, high overhead, but the bare trees round the house swayed and shook and there were swift whirlpools of straw in the stable yard. Ben changed from the Sunday suit he had worn at the inquest and went about his duties. Thunderclap, too, had been kicked yesterday and was very slightly lame in the off fore.
Brenda took off her hat and threw it down on a chair in the hall. ‘Nothing to say, is there?’

The way the eloquent description is capped off by the taut, abbreviated dialogue is masterly. The desolate scene in the stable yard echoes, mirrors, symbolises or represents Brenda’s state of mind. So that all is needed by way of dialogue is not a long speech of anguish but the opposite, a short taut sentence saying it all.  It’s not rocket science, it’s not a new technique in the novel; it’s just done very, very well.

Tony aboard a cheap steamer heading in bad weather down the English Channel, which is carrying one other passenger:

The wash of the ship was quickly lost in the high waves. They were steaming westward down the Channel. As it grew to be night, lighthouses appeared flashing from the French coast. Presently a steward walked round the bright, upper deck striking chimes on a gong of brass cylinders, and the genial passenger went below to prepare himself for dinner in hot sea water which splashed from side to side of the bath and dissolved the soap in a thin, sticky scum. He was the only man to dress that evening: Tony sat in the mustering darkness until the second bell. Then he left his greatcoat in the cabin and went down to dinner.

For me it is a physical, imaginative and psychological pleasure greater than anything a movie or TV adaptation could possibly give me, to read words like this. The precision of what they describe, the precision of their vocabulary, the fluency of their expression, the contrasting rhythms between the opening three relatively short sentences and then the long middle one which rolls and rights itself like the ship it describes. The subject matter may be bitter and grim, but it is always an immense pleasure to read Waugh’s beautifully clear and expressive prose.

Related links

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on December 15, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 15, 2021

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