EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES Volume 27, Number 1 Spring, 1993

MAN OVERBOARD: CYRIL CONNOLLY IN AUSTIN By Robert Murray Davis (University of Oklahoma) In May, 1971, Cyril Connolly came to Austin at the invitation of the University of Texas's Humanities Research Center to be the major attraction at the exhibit based on his The Modern Movement: One Hundred Key Books (1965). Unlike some of his countrymen who sneer at the idea of the Center without having visited Austin, Connolly was charmed by the setting and moved by the memorial to art because it gave him "a sense of belonging to the tradition, a boost to the ego for one's diffident London self." He even liked the accommodations, "an enormous double room in a hotel which is called a club to be able to serve liquor and which provides appetising Southern food and iced tea" ("Apotheosis in Austin," Sunday Times, 6 June 1971). Connolly was being unusually generous; this was undoubtedly the Forty Acres Club, named after the original area of the University of Texas campus. The food was unexceptional even by middle-American standards, and Connolly charitably did not mention the wall paper, striped black and white, which gave one the impression of being inside a trans I ucent zebra. But the Forty Acres Club did have a bar, and most evenings one could see the chairman (equal emphasis on both syllables) of the University of Texas Board of Regents, Frank Erwin, sporting the University colors in white hair and burnt orange blazer. Orange does not flatter the complexions of white Texans, who run to red or dusty tan, but Erwin's jacket was a statement of power, not fashion. Connolly was justifiably impressed by the Humanities Research Center. In stereotypic Texas fashion, the University had gone through the dealers and executors of Europe like a Dallas matron through Nieman Marcus. Harry H. Ransom (Connolly calls him William). President of the University, had funded the Center with Texas oil money, and Warren Roberts, who directed the Center, made annual trips to England to buy archival material in carload lots. He brought it to the original Center headquarters in a very crowded corner on the top floor of the Undergraduate Library next to the Tower, from the top of which a crazed but proficient marksman had shot passing students and professors a few years earlier. Connolly was flattered to see that the Center had acquired some of his manuscripts and impressed by the fact that it had already acquired an impressive number of manuscripts of the works mentioned in The Modern Movement, had proofs or rare editions of others, and set out to acquire still more to complete the exhibit. I had no part in the festivities associated with the exhibit; a newly tenured associate professor at the University of Oklahoma, I had come a mere four hundred miles to work on a catalogue of the Center's collection of materials by and about Evelyn Waugh (including Connolly's unpublished biographical sketch of Evelyn Waugh commissioned by Life). most, including his books and the . furniture of his library, purchased directly from the Waugh estate a few years earlier. The Waugh collection was impressive by any normal measurement, but it formed a minor part of the Center's holdings. Moreover, in 1971 Waugh was generally regarded as a relatively minor comic novelist, though his first novel, Decline and Fall, had made Connolly's list as "one of the wittiest and most original of first novels" with "the old avant-garde Adam" before it was sadly vitiated by overt Catholicism. He had died only five years earlier; the editions of diaries and letters were in early planning stages, if that. It was exciting to work on material that very few people had seen, but it was often no less puzzling. I was reading Waugh's diaries for the late 1920's and early 1930's, and the entries were sometimes fragmentary or allusive, identifying people, important to him but unknown to me, by first names or nicknames. For cataloguing purposes, I did not need to know them, but I planned to do further work on Waugh, and besides, given this opportunity to rummage in someone's private life, it was maddening not to know all the details. I had never met or corresponded with Waugh or, except for a brief encounter with Fr. Martin D'Arcy at Loyola University in the early 1960's, anyone who had known him. Therefore, when I was introduced to Cyril Connolly, a small man by American standards, then in his late sixties and not quite as round and rubicund as he had been in earlier years, I regarded him less as an important man of letters than as a source of information about Waugh. Connolly did not seem to resent the attitude of an unknown American thirty years his junior. When I told him what 1 was doing and what problems I encountered, he seemed interested in the -2- project. Perhaps he had already performed his main duties; he certainly seemed to have time to spare, and he came to the table where I had laid out the materials and scanned the diary passages I had noted. At the time, I thought that he was being extraordinarily obliging; now I suspect that he was even more delighted than I to be privy to information, some of it libelous and most of it discreditable, about people he had actually known. We were among the first to read these diaries. Two decades later, readers are occasionally shocked by the tone and content of the expurgated diaries, and when in 1973 the Observer announced that excerpts would be published, booking agents must have been overrun by Waugh's contemporaries fleeing the country. The discretion of Michael Davie, the advice of libel lawyers, and the death of some of the principals made the published version less scandalous than it might have been, but even so, a number of readers were outraged. Not Connolly, who did not appear in passages I showed him; not me, an outsider who regarded the people as extensions or, more accurately, models for the outrageous characters who people Waugh's books. Connolly stopped at the reference to an Audrey who thought she was pregnant but turned out not to be. "That has to be Audrey Lucas," he said, and gave further details about her family and tate. Other names he identified with less editorial comment. He was obviously used to dealing efficiently with words and facts, and besides being grateful for his kindness, I enjoyed watching a professional at \."lork. Later we had gone to the main library in the Tower on some errand-perhaps I had offered to help him look up a reference-and were walking through the lobby of the Undergraduate Library past cases filled with manuscripts and first editions mentioned in The Modern Movement. Near the inner doors of the library Connolly stopped abruptly. He moved as close to the exhibit as the glass allowed and stared at a copy, propped open to show the marginal annotations, of the first edition of his book of reflections, The Unquiet Grave, published in 1944 under the pseudonym "Palinurus," after the pilot of Aeneas lost overboard and unburied. The annotations, many of them extensive, were in Waugh's unmistakable handwriting. On an earlier visit, before the book had been enshrined, I had read Waugh's pointed and largely unflattering comments, but I had grown accustomed to his free and frank appraisals of writing, including his own. But then it wasn't my work. Having seen only the facing pages, Connolly did not seem agitated, but he wanted to examine the rest. I think it was the formidable Mrs. Mary Hirth who had the power to disrupt the exhibit, and within hours the book was in Connolly's hands and he was reading Waugh's comments, some of them recorded in Alan Bell's "Waugh Drops the Pilot" (Spectator, 7 March 1987, pp. 27, 30-31). I don't remember his exact words when he finished, but he was obviously quite disturbed by Waugh's comments comparing the book's persona to a stage Irishman, a lady novelist, and a "tosh­ horse," presumably Waugh's term for a pretentious litterateur. The comments on Connolly's character must have stung enough to make the subject pass over Waugh's frank admission of the similarities between them. Connolly's obvious unhappiness put me in the uncomfortable position of trying to console a much older and far more distinguished man. I said that Waugh made these comments under very difficult conditions: with the British Mission in Yugoslavia, surrounded by Communists and having to drink the local wine. I pointed to passages in Waugh's diaries of the period which dealt with his discomforts and to another which mentioned the fact that he obviously valued the book enough to have it bound. Unfortunately, the entry for January 9-10 characterized The Unquiet Grave as half commonplace book of French maxims, half a lament for his life. Poor Lys; he sees her as the embodiment of the blackout and air raids and rationing and compulsory service and jean as the golden past of beaches and peaches and lemurs. It is badly written in places, with painful psychological jargon which he attempts to fit into service of theological [Davie reads "teleological"] problems. And this was a week before Waugh annotated the book. My attempts to mitigate Connolly's unhappiness obviously had not worked, but I did not know how badly I had failed until I read his "Apotheosis in Austin." What Connolly "minded most was the contempt which emerged from a writer for whom for twenty years (1923-1943) I had looked upon as a friend." Connolly's distress, obviously genuine, is partly the result of a defective memory. Ten months after Waugh read the "Horizon" edition, his review of the revised book appeared in the Tablet. No kinder than the marginalia, it was, despite Waugh's judgment that it was "feeble" (Diaries, 28 October 1945), far wickeder and more coherent. -3- Waugh did not exactly claim ignorance of the pseudonymous author's identity, but he did assert that "obiter dicta of this kind gain much in importance from knowledge of the speaker; suppose Goering has said 'L'art est sottise,' and Rim baud 'When I hear the word "Art," I feel for my pistol.'" Then, professional as always, Waugh lamented the waste or misuse of material used prematurely, without the shaping influence of art. Instead, the author "has sought a factitious unity by attempting an innocent and ingenious imposture, pretending to relate [jottings] to classical mythology to the great awe and perplexity of the literary ladies of the Dorchester Hotel." The diagnosis of the persons's schizophrenia, noted in the marginalia, is developed fully in the review, with praise for the melancholy "middle-aged gentleman in reduced circumstances" and his comic Irish servant and horror at "the flushed and impetuous figure of a woman novelist" who gives "full rein to the tosh-horse whose hooves thunder through the penultimate passages.'' Nevertheless, though Waugh thinks that Palinurus "has been duped and distracted by the chatter of psychoanalysts and socialists," he calls the book's ending "as beautiful as any passages of modern English prose that I know." When the review appeared, Waugh took satisfaction in the mild stir it caused. He was told that Connolly refused to read it on the grounds that it would end their friendship and later that Raymond Mortimer told Connolly that the review was flattering. Mortimer later denied saying anything of the sort, but Connolly did read the review and was apparently crushed at the time, though by 1971 his resentment 'vvas overshadowed by horror at Waugh's unexpurgated views of the book. Connolly's sense of betrayal in "Apotheosis" is all the more curious in view of the history of their relationship. Waugh consistently referred to Connolly as "Boots" because Virginia Woolf had delighted his friends by labeling him "that smartiboots Connolly.'' In Enemies of Promise (1938), Connolly had seen that Waugh's early satires depended on cruelty. Characteristically good-hearted, Connolly thought that the humor "was derived from his ignorance of life. He found cruel things funny because he did not understand them, and he was able to communicate that fun.'' By 1945, Waugh was no longer funny, and in "Apotheosis" Connolly complained about his "coarseness of heart" in his revjew of The Unquiet Grave. (In turn, Waugh had warned Connolly about fashionable political hysteria in his 1938 review of Enemies, as he was to condemn easy jargon in the annotations and in his review.) And in 1947, during the negotiations over the publication of Waugh's The Loved One in Connolly's Horizon, Connolly tried to get his friend to make the hero less heartless. Connolly apparently thought he had the last word: in 1967, a year after Waugh's death, Connolly broadcast new and damaging reservations about The Loved One, which he had praised unreservedly in his introduction to the Horizon version. The two men looked rather alike-short, stout enough in middle age to need the services of "starving places," as Waugh called them. They shared many tastes: for cigars, good food, wine, and objets d'art, though Connolly preferred French and Waugh Victorian. In his annotations, Waugh recognized points of resemblance: He has the authentic lack of scholarship of my generation ... the authentic love of leisure and liberty and good living, the authentic romantic snobbery, the authentic waste-land despair, the authentic high gift of expression. What divided them was Faith: "There," Waugh wrote, "but for the Grace of God literally .... " Waugh's sense of art was firmer than his hope of grace, for he criticized the prose of Thomas Merton as strongly, if not as wickedly, as he did Connolly's, and without the corresponding praise. Nor did his Catholicism make him lovable or even, by normal standards, charitable-though, as he told Nancy Milford, without religion he would have been scarcely human. Had he been more human, he would not have written the books which have endured far longer than the ten years which Connolly thought necessary for a modern classic. The Unquiet Grave has stayed in print, off and on, for that requisite period, but it is now almost unknown in America and seems little regarded in England. Had it not been for Waugh's unkind comments, Alan Bell would not have resurrected its memory. Time has not overturned Waugh's judgment. Connolly's lament ends with an extract from the diaries I had shown him. Connolly chose an earlier, happier period, of 28 October 1942, because it was "so completely typical of Evelyn in his prime as a man and a writer.'' Waugh congratulates himself on "a good year" in which he begot a child, published a book, and-remember that this was during the austerities of World War II­ smoked 300 good cigars and consumed as many bottles of wine. This ability to enjoy the obvious pleasures of life was the basis of their friendship. It is pleasant to know that, by introducing Connolly to Waugh's diaries, I helped to mitigate his pain. -4- SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT FATHER ROTHSCHILD By David Bittner In 1988, when I wrote my M.A. thesis on Evelyn Waugh and the Jews, I naturally had to deal with the character of Father Rothschild in Vile Bodies. At the time I accepted Donald Greene's explanation that Rothschild's speech diagnosing the woes of the world did not "jibe" with the satiric portrait of the priest (7). It was important for me to make the point that the invention of Rothschild as an anti-Semitic caricature seemed flawed by his being given a serious speech. I said it could mislead the reader into interpreting Rothschild as a character of whom Waugh approved rather than as an anti-Semitic caricature. In rereading Vile Bodies, however, and coming across the speech again,! have been struck by the fact that it does seem to contain some satiric elements - none that would at all necessarily increase Rothschild's unattractiveness as an anti-Semitic stereotype, but some which would just add to the presentation of him as a figure of fun. I don't quibble with Rothschild's prediction of war (185), which I'm sure is meant deadly seriously by Waugh, but with several parts of his observations about youth. First of all, doesn't it leave Rothschild a bit open to derision to suggest that if he knows "very few young people" (183), there is any valid generalization he could make about them a//, such as to say that they are "all possessed of an almost fatal hunger of permanence" (183)? And how does easy willingness to divorce indicate a "hunger of permanence"? If anything, a penchant for casual divorce would seem to prove a taste for transience in life. The assertion by Rothschild would thus seem to make him look foolish. Moreover, isn't Rothschild leaving himself open to satiric criticism by evidently failing to understand why some young people choose divorce? If he can't understand why people aren't content to "muddle through" a bad marriage and make the best of a "bad job" (183), it seems to me that this just invites criticism of Rothschild as the exponent of a church which takes a notoriously hard line against divorce. (Waugh was not yet Catholic when he wrote Vile Bodies.) Finally, does Rothschild even represent the outlook of youth authentically? (Perhaps this is where the fact that he knows very few young people shows.) When Adam criticizes "bogus" marriages, he does not seem to be advocating casual divorce at all but rather seems to be emphasizing the importance of making sensible marriages that endure (even if his motive is partly mercenary; 169-170). This would seem to be in the persona of Waugh, who regretted the break-up of his first marriage to Evelyn Gardner and was shortly to write an article called "Let the Marriage Ceremony Mean Something" (Davis 129): I'm not going to make this into one of my usual strident essays because I'm on much less familiar ground in the case of Vile Bodies than Brideshead Revisited. All I want to do is raise the question: doesn't the famous speech of Father Rothschild add to the satiric presentation of him?. Christopher Sykes thought the speech was "sentimental" and indicates his reason for believing it is flawed is not that it is too serious. When he told Waugh what he thought about the speech, Waugh agreed it was "very silly" (99). Perhaps there is additional support of my analysis in Calvin Lane's observation that "there is never any rational meeting of mind or will" reflected in the action or conversation of Vile Bodies's characters (57). He says the novel has the Alice in Wonderland ring of "cross purposes" to it. Rothschild would seem to be at cross purposes with himself in combining sense (his prediction of war) with nonsense (his observations of youth). Lane also points out that it is not unusual for Waugh in Vile Bodies to move from "stinging" satiric attack to a scene in which the satiric note is "muted" (59), and a scene which begins with Rothschild nonsense and ends with Rothschild sense would seem to fit that description. I invite anyone to answer my question(s). Works Cited Davis, Robert Murray. Evelyn Waugh and the Forms of His Time. Washington, D.C.: Catholic U of America P, 1989. Greene, Donald. "Who Was Father Rothschild?" Evelyn Waugh Newsletter 11 (1975):7-9. Lane, Calvin W. Evelyn Waugh. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Sykes, Christopher. Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. London: Collins, 1975. Waugh, Evelyn. Vile Bodies. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977.

THE HERO'S MISADVENTURE IN DECLINE AND FALL by John Howard Wilson (Dakota Wesleyan University) Unlikely as it may seem, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell, has given me an insight into the humor of Evelyn Waugh. Many critics have tried to explain Waugh's humor, often by -5- emphasizing his satire of the modern world, sometimes by suggesting comparisons with Firbank or Wodehouse. These explanations have always seemed inadequate to me, since I find comparisons between authors unconvincing, and since I laugh without always knowing what Waugh may be satirizing, if he is satirizing anything at all. Campbell's analysis of the hero's adventure suggests that Waugh's humor springs from deeper sources. Far from following "the thread of the hero-path" (Campbell 25), Waugh's early novels parody adventure, frustrating the heroes' attempts to move through modern wastelands. Even though the heroes are abused in various ways, they remain ludicrous, not pitiable, because they persistently refuse to heed the call to adventure. They cannot adjust to the smallest disruptions in their lives, as even children and fools prove able to do in tale after tale, and the infantile helplessness of these heroes is laughable to anyone even vaguelyfamiliarwith the collections of the Brothers Grimm. We find their situations funny not because we are callous, but because we subconsciously recognize Waugh's systematic departure from the hero's usual progress through folk tales, where characters enjoy happy endings quite different from the one in Vile Bodies. Waugh's early work is funny largely because he resisted writing the same old story. Let me explain, with Campbell as my guide and Decline and Fall as my example. Campbell finds that the "mythological hero ... proceeds to the threshold of adventure," where "he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage" (245). The presence in Decline and Fall is Lumsden of Strathdrummond, member of the Bollinger Club, who denounces Paul Pennyfeather as "an awful man wearing the Boiler tie" (5). Paul recognizes neither the guard nor the threshold, and, instead of being "slain by the opponent" (Campbell246), he suffers only mock dismemberment, losing his trousers instead of his limbs. Paul tries to run away, but he has already passed the threshold, having moved into "a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers)" (Campbell 246). Paul is tested first by the senior members of Scone College, who expel him, and then by his guardian, who disinherits him. Severed from his old life, Paul needs help from Mr. Levy of Church and Gargoyle, scholastic agents, and from Dr. Fagan. Paul gets the job as schoolmaster, but neither "helper" offers really "magical aid," since Mr. Levy takes five percent of Paul's salary, which Dr. Fagan has already reduced by twenty-five percent. Paul's helpers and testers are funny not only because they are greedy, or objects of satire, but also because their greed contrasts so sharply with the generosity of fairy godmothers and the like. Paul himself suggests a laughable contrast, unable to do anything but accept the dubious blessings that descend on him, while more fortunate heroes come into possession of legendary swords, magic potions, and geese that lay golden eggs. Dr. Fagan leads Paul to Llanabba Castle, which might serve as the setting for a romance, except that this "castle" is "formidably feudal" only from the front, erected at "the time of the cotton famine in the [eighteen] 'sixties" (18). Here Paul suffers additional tests, or pseudo-tests, in the form of Mr. Prendergast and his "Doubts." Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington presents another, when he offers Paul twenty pounds "for sort of damages, you know" (51) Paul senses that the offer is "a test case of the durability of my ideals" (53) and refuses the money. Paul has, however, acquired another helper, Captain Grimes, who has instructed Trumpington to "send money quick." Paul expresses his dismay, but he feels, "in spite of himself, ... a great wave of satisfaction surge up within him" (54). The feeling is the first indication that Paul is learning anything from his adventure, abandoning the deadening code of the "British bourgeoisie" (54), doing, in Grimes's words, "just exactly what one wants to and when one wants to" (40). Encouraged by Grimes to affirm the life within him, Paul is ready to fall in love, which he does as soon as he sees Margot Beste-Chetwynde. Meanwhile, Paul listens to even more absurd helpers. Philbrick, the shapeshifting butler, shows him how fluid the notion of self can be, while Peter, the aristocratic schoolboy, tells Paul to get to the masters' bath ahead of Mr. Prendergast. Despite all this instruction, Paul's next step is backward. In "Interlude in Belgravia," Paul simply resumes his old identity, and "the shadow that has flitted about this narrative under the name of Paul Pennyfeather materialized into the solid figure of an intelligent, well-educated, well-conducted young man" (162). His adventure has had, in other words, no effect on him, and he continues to refuse the call. At this point, "the nadir of the mythological round," many heroes are ready for "apotheosis" (Campbell 246), but Paul certainly is not. In fact, Paul is not even worthy of the term "hero," as Waugh makes clear, insisting that "readers must not complain if the shadow which took his name does not amply fill the important part of hero for which he was originally cast" (163). Again, the effect is comic, not because Waugh is satirizing weak-willed young Englishmen, but because he is centering his narrative on someone so unlike the hero with a thousand faces. The point of the adventure is "expansion of consciousness" (Campbell 246), and thus Paul is obliged to endure a "second disappearance" (164). Peter once again serves as helper, leading Paul to King's Thursday. Once "the finest piece of domestic Tudor in England" (152), the house has been -6- replaced by a "surprising creation of ferro concrete and aluminium" (159). To this parody of mythological setting, Waugh adds parody of mythological events. One reward the hero typically gains is "his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement)" (Campbell246). Paul's real father is dead, and at King's Thursday two substitutes offer him what little recognition he receives. The first is Maltravers, who is to marry Margot and become the father figure in an Oedipal triangle. He tells Paul "the story of my life" (174), talking instead of listening, alienating his "son" instead of embracing him. The second substitute is Peter. When Margot and Paul decide to marry, Margot says that "we must ask Peter about it" (181-82). Like a magnanimous father, Peter says that marriage is "what I've been trying to arrange all this week. As a matter of fact, that's why I brought you here at all" (182). Paul atones as well as he can, though recognition comes from a son instead of a father, the father figure having already ignored his mythological responsibility. Another reward for the hero is "sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage)." Paul actually achieves sexual union with Margot, though it is hardly a sacred marriage, since Margot is interested only in Paul's sexual prowess. Just before their wedding, Paul is arrested, thus losing "the boon he came to gain." Paul has not survived a "supreme ordeal" (Campbell246); he has simply been sent to Marseilles to release Margot's prostitutes. Even there, Paul refuses the adventure presented by the Rue de Reynarde, "forsaking, in a moment of panic, both his black hat and his self-possession," fleeing "for the broad streets and the tram lines where, he knew at heart, was his spiritual home" (203). Paul doesn't realize it, but he is abetting the sale of sex without love, the debased version of the reward he hopes to gain. Despite his ignorance and fear, he manages to free the prostitutes, in effect opposing the true goddess. Margot is, of course, only a parody: she is attractive, and she has a son, but she retires to her bedroom and drugs herself during menstruation, when she is most fertile. The Latin-American Entertainment Co., Ltd. also suppresses fertility, and its operation appropriately prevents the appearance of a sacred marriage between Paul and Margot. As long as she runs her business, Margot remains a goddess of sterility, and she keeps Paul from seeing the ends he actually serves. Once the hero has taken his reward, he often "flees and is pursued," experiencing an "obstacle flight" or "transformation flight" (Campbell 246). Paul is also pursued by the powers of his world­ Scotland Yard and the League of Nations-but flight never occurs to him, and he lamely supposes he "must go with this man" (212). Sentenced to "seven years' penal servitude" (218), Paul encounters more "helpers" and more "tests," rejoining Philbrick and Mr. Prendergast, being introduced to Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery and the Lion of the Lord's Elect. Placed in solitary confinement, Paul endures Decline and Fall's version of the belly of the whale. Usually the belly occurs early in the myth, as a way of crossing the threshold of adventure. By choosing confinement over flight, Waugh emphasizes the regressive nature of the story and the hero. Instead of feeling frustrated, Paul finds it "exhilarating ... never to have to make any decision on any subject, to be wholly relieved from the smallest consideration of time, meals, or clothes, to have no anxiety ever about what kind of impression he was making; in fact, to be free" (229). Paul is happy because he is back in a routine like the one he had enjoyed at Oxford; he is free to refuse the adventure he has been refusing all along. He has learned almost nothing, belatedly recognizing "that there was something radically inapplicable about this whole code of ready-made honour that is the still small voice, trained to command, of the Englishman all the world over" (252). Later he perceives that "Grimes ... was of the immortals" (269). Paul is, however, unable to absorb the vitality of the other characters, unable to transcend "the dead weight of precept, inherited from generations of schoolmasters and divines" (252). When Margot visits him, Paul is silent, then sarcastic, quashing any chance of a sacred marriage, and feeling "greatly pained at how little he was pained by the events of the afternoon" (263). Paul remains a singularly unenlightened hero, and that is funny, in that it is unexpected, though it is also a little sad. After the flight, or, in Paul's case, the incarceration, the "final work is that of the return" (Campbell 246). Again, Paul proves inept at doing anything himself, and his "Resurrection" has to be staged by others. Margot and Maltravers, now married, deliver their "son" from prison, entrusting him to more "helpers"-Dr. Fagan, Trumpington, an alcoholic surgeon-who fake Paul's death during a fake appendectomy. Like everything else in Decline and Fall, Paul's death is only a parody, but it leads to his re-birth, also a parody. Paul finally makes it to Corfu, though there he meets Otto Silenus instead of Margot. Having grown his mustache, Paul returns to "uneventful residence at Scone," studying theology, hearing "an interesting paper ... about the Polish plebiscites," and listening to the Bollinger Club's "confused roaring and breaking of glass" (289). Having emerged from "the kingdom of dread," the hero is supposed to leave "the transcendental powers ... behind" (Campbell 246). Paul has separated himself from Margot and Grimes, but Philbrick appears in Oxford, along with Dr. Fagan's book, and Peter, now called Pastmaster, finds his way to Paul's rooms -7- after the Bollingerdinner. Paul seems to think he is safe, but the forces that overwhelmed him are still at large. He has not been changed by his adventure, and thus he is unable to effect any change in his society. Instead of returning with an "elixir" that "restores the world" (Campbell 246), Paul brings back only Silenus's simplistic distinction between static and dynamic types, and the conviction that the Church had been right to condemn "a bishop in Bithynia" (288) and "the ascetic Ebionites" (293). Paul remains committed to "the dead weight of precept," supporting a world of division and judgment instead of learning tolerance and affirmation. Some may consider Paul's failure peculiar to modern England and commend Waugh for exposing this problem in his society. Stories from many cultures show, however, that failure to change is a common condition, lead1ng to wastelands that can be redeemed only through herioc action. All these stories suggest that Paul should fill "the important part of hero," but he just won't. Paul's inertia is the main source of humor in Decline and Fall, and the main cause of despair. More could be said about mythological themes in this novel; much more could be said about these themes in the rest of Waugh's work. Heroes in the early novels are generally as helpless as Paul. They may succeed, like Paul, in returning to some barren refuge, as William Boot manages to do in Scoop. Other novels consign heroes to even more extreme wastelands-the battlefield in Vile Bodies, the cannibal feast in Black Mischief, the plantation of Mr. Todd in A Handful of Dust. Waugh's methods and intentions changed toward the middle of his career, and he wrote two novels, Work Suspended and Put Out More Flags, inconclusive in their treatment of the hero's progress. Brideshead Revisited marked a more obvious change, not only in theme and style, but also in the way the adventure transforms the consciousness of the hero, leading Charles Ryder to convert to Roman Catholicism. Guy Crouchback has his faith at the beginning of the trilogy, but he too is transformed, from a priggish nationalist to a compassionate human being who has begun to understand the demands of his religion. Brideshead and the trilogy are versions of the hero's adventure more conventional than those in the early novels, and in these terms they can be appreciated quite apart from their Catholicism, which seems to pose such a problem for so many critics. Attention to mythological themes in Waugh might also help us to move past the aging and increasingly useless distinction between "satirical" and "serious" novels, helping us to see the later work as a natural amplification of the early work, not as a puzzling break from it. Mythological analysis would, finally, help to reveal the sources of both humor and melancholy in Waugh's narratives. Such analysis may well become more and more important in understanding Waugh, as topical jokes and other references become more and more remote. Works Cited Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1949. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973. Waugh, Evelyn. Decline and Fall. 1928. Boston: Little, 1956.

WAUGH FIRST EDITIONS FOR SALE

(1) BRIDESHEAD REVISITED. Boston: Little, Brown, 1945. 1/600 copies, preceding first American trade edition. (This is not the smaller regular version with Charles and Julia at the fountain on dust jacket.) Very good, with a few chips at perimeters. $350

(2) WORK SUSPENDED. And Other Stories Written Before the Second World War. London: Chapman & Hall, 1948. First edition. Fine, in a dust jacket sunned and slightly worn at the spine. $150

(3) OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN. Boston: Little, Brown, 1955. First edition. Very good (a few discolored spots on endpapers) in dust jacket. $25

Price of each book reflects amount paid several years ago; negotiation possible if situation warrants. For more information, contact: Michael H. Choi, 26 Irving Street #1 B, Boston, MA 02114.

NEW CASSETTES OF WAUGH NOVELS Books on Tape has just made available Waugh's Put Out More Flags and the three volumes of the Sword of Honour trilogy on cassettes. David Case reads the novels with perception and precision, and his voice is effectively geared to the varied tone of both characters and events. POMF, which runs eight hours, is on eight cassettes. The End of the Battle is unabridged and runs nine hours. It is on six cassettes. The cassettes may be bought or rented. The cassette of EB, for example, may be purchased for $48 or rented for $14.50. Write to Books on Tape, P.O. Box 7900, Newport Beach, California 92658. -8- STANNARD'S BIOGRAPHY We have received several inquiries about the accuracy of Martin Stannard's recent Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966. Robert Murray Davis's review in EWNS (Autumn 1992), pp. 7-8, should be the final word. I wrote a brief review for Choice: Books for College Libraries noting Stannard's pronounced bias against Waugh. Among other aspects, Stannard overemphasizes character faults while favorable qualities, for example, Waugh's innumerable charity gifts are either ignored or grudgingly mentioned. Furthermore, many of Stannard's theories and interpretations of Waugh's motives and books are invalid. Most of Stannard's comments about Brides head Revisited, for instance, are total nonsense. Stannard desperately needs several courses in theology and apologetics. Even some of Stannard's approach to research must be challenged; e.g., he uses the 1972 edition of the Waugh bibliography and not the 1986 updated edition. For a book that is supposed to reveal all, we are left with unanswered questions. What was Father Caraman's "malpractice"? Seemingly he favored Waugh's daughter in her office job, but there are hints of darker defects. What are they? Stannard is quoted in a postscript to the New York Times Book Review as seeing Waugh's reputation in the 1970's in decline. Perhaps in England, certainly not in the USA or Canada. Stannard's inadequacy is soon revealed when he admits to the restricting early-novels-are-the-best syndrome. His statement that "I like him [Waugh] a lot" is never observed in his biography or in sufficient dedication to understanding theological and similar ramifications. One might uncharitably suspect that commercial considerations rather than "liking" were Stannard's motivations for producing the biography. (He once inquired if he would be paid if he wrote for EWN -not exactly a scholarly approach.) In brief, a satisfactory biographer of Waugh has yet to be found. Sykes and Stannard just won't do! (PAD)

RUSHDIE RE WAUGH In a new short story, Salman Rushdie alludes to the fiction of Evelyn Waugh. "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers" is a fantastic version of events in May 1970, when MGM sold a pair of slippers used in filming The Wizard of Oz. Rushdie notes the "presence of imaginary beings in the Salesroom." Another imaginary being, a "literary character, condemned to an eternity of reading the works of Dickens to an armed madman in a jungle, has sent in a written bid" (61 ). The character is, of course, Tony Last in A Handful of Dust, still looking for a way home. Rushdie himself, he says in an essay published with the story, has "done a good deal of thinking, these past three years, about the advantages of a good pair of ruby slippers ... " (19). The government of Iran recently endorsed its four-year-old sentence of death against Rushdie, who is still living in secrecy, protected by the British government. His story and his delightful essay on the film have been published as The Wizard of Oz, by Salman Rushdie, (London: British Film Institute, 1992), available from Indiana University Press. The allusion seems to be Rushdie's first to Waugh's fiction. Rushdie's first novel, Grimus (1975), mentioned a "vile body," but the singular form recalls Paul rather than Waugh. Midnight's Children (1980) and The Satanic Verses (1988) are densely written, broad-ranging novels, and it would be easy to miss a reference, but I didn't see any. Shame (1983) and Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) also seem not to notice Waugh. Rushdie mentions Waugh twice in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, but only as Waugh appears in the letters of Graham Greene and the gossip of Hollywood. I have yet to see The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987). -John Howard Wilson

The Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies, designed to stimulate research and continue interest in the life and writings of Evelyn Waugh, is published three times a year in April, September and December (Spring, Autumn, and Winter numbers). Subscription rate $8.00 a year. Single copy $3.00. Checks and money orders should be made payable to the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter. Overseas subscriptions must be paid in US funds: MO, check, or cash. Notes, brief essays, and news items about Waugh and his work may be submitted, but manuscripts cannot be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Address all correspondence to Dr. P. A. Doyle, English Dept., Nassau Community College, State University of New York, Garden City, N.Y. 11530. Editorial Board-Editor: P. A. Doyle; Associate Editors: Winnifred M. Bogaards (University of New Brunswick); Alfred W. Borrello (Kingsborough Community College); Robert M. Davis (Univ. of Oklahoma); Heinz Kosok (Univ. of Wuppertal); Charles E. Linck, Jr. (East Texas State Univ.).