EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER and STUDIES Vol

EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES Vol. 36, No. 1 Spring 2005 “The Funniest Book in the World”: Waugh and The Diary of a Nobody by Peter Morton Flinders University Evelyn Waugh did not enjoy his Christmas of 1946. It was the second after the war and the national mood was somber. Troops were still being demobilized and the food rationing was worse than ever. As a Christmas “bonus” the government had allowed an extra eight pence worth of meat (half to be corned beef), but bread and potatoes were about to be rationed for the first time. To top it all, the weather was deteriorating and the winter 1946-7 would be the worst in living memory. Waugh, then in his early 40s, was en famille at Piers Court, and that was always a trial in itself. And he felt beleaguered. New houses were encroaching on his land, the socialist “grey lice” were in government, taxes were punitive and he was thinking of emigrating to Ireland. He tried to stay in fairly good humor on the day itself, for the sake of the children, but without much success. He was disgusted by his children’s shoddy presents and the general disorder. Their lunch was cold and ill-cooked. His wife had given him some caviar, but he had eaten that the week before. All in all, it was a “ghastly” day. He had already told his diary that he was looking forward to his forthcoming stay in hospital, for an operation on his hemorrhoids, to get away from them all.[1] The one bright spot of the day was his mother’s gift: a copy of George & Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody, the seventh edition (J. W. Arrowsmith, 1924), with an introduction by Sir John Squire.[2] Why did she choose this particular book? We surmise that it was because of her son’s fond employment of the Diary in Brideshead Revisited, published the year before. There he had made Sebastian Flyte’s mother, Lady Marchmain, read it out loud of an evening. With her “beautiful voice and great humour of expression” she solaces her family as they try to come to terms with Sebastian’s alcoholism. She reads from it “with great spirit until ten o’clock,” and continues on a later evening.[3] Kate Waugh would surely have been touched by this scene, for it is a piece of reworked biography. Waugh had known the Diary since earliest childhood. It had figured among those theatrical reading sessions in Arthur Waugh’s study which were such a prominent part of the early imaginative lives of both the Waugh brothers. According to Alec Waugh’s account, these readings went on well into Evelyn’s teenage years. The latter’s own late account (censored of all anti-paternal feeling) says: “For some eight years of my life for some three or four evenings a week when we were at home, he read to me, my brother and to whatever friends might be in the house, for an hour or more from his own old favourites. … Often it was pure entertainment; Vice Versa or The Diary of a Nobody.”[4] The influence of these sessions eventually went deep, but at the time the youthful Waugh reacted against them with growing embarrassment and disdain. Whether he initially found the Diary as amusing as his father did is questionable. Arthur Waugh may have found it truly comical, but the first reviews had ranged from the indifferent to the downright hostile. “A photographic representation of middle-class boredom and horseplay,” snarled the Athenaeum, accusing the Grossmiths of vulgarity, snobbishness and— unkindest cut of all—of being not funny enough.[5] It is clear that the Diary was a “sleeper” which started to hit its stride among the wider public only about the time of the First World War, and it did so at first among people who were distinctly anti-Modernist in their sympathies. Admiring the Diary, even singing its praises excessively, made a convenient gesture of defiance. One might celebrate its charm while patronizing it too. The characteristic note is struck by the conservative essayist and journalist D. B. Wyndham Lewis, writing in the early 1920s. According to Lewis, admirers of the Diary at that time were the “salt of the earth,” by which he meant men of the legal and political Establishment; people like “Lord Rosebery, Mr Augustine Birrell, Mr Hilaire Belloc, one of H. M. Ambassadors, and at least one Abbot of Benedictines”: in short, middle-aged men of sentimental tastes who were nostalgic about the Diary’s values and possibly enjoyed a chuckle at the expense of the lower orders.[6] As the very type of the Georgian litterateur, Arthur Waugh fitted perfectly into such a group. According to his son he “always referred to himself as ‘incorrigibly Victorian’” even though he outlived the Victorian age by forty years. He regarded the emerging geniuses of Modernism with blank incomprehension. Eliot and his circle he regarded (again, according to his son) as absurd, and he spoke of D. H. Lawrence as a writer whose imaginative powers had been abandoned on a midden.[7] Contemptuous though the young Evelyn Waugh was of such aesthetic conservatism, he did eventually come to share many of his father’s literary tastes, including his appreciation of the Diary. In 1930, when his career as a novelist was gathering pace, Waugh wrote a column on diaries as a literary form and made there his bold claim: I still think that the funniest book in the world is Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody. If only people would really keep journals like that. Nobody wants to read other people’s reflections on life and religion and politics, but the routine of their day, properly recorded, is always interesting, and will become more so as conditions change with the years.[8] This comment should be understood for what it was. Waugh was not engaging in serious critical debate; he was scribbling copy for the Daily Mail at the rate of £30 per 800-word column. He was being paid to air provocative opinions, not to make finely nuanced observations. But his judgment on the Diary was apparently sincere, and certainly he put his finger on one of its appeals, which makes it an important social document: it deals with the routines of lower-middle-class Victorian urban life in a way that ought to be boring but is actually funny and fascinating. It is worth considering that Waugh learnt more from the Diary than that. At this time he was refining his early aesthetic goal, which was to pare down his narrative to the barest bones of dialogue and action. He would surely have been impressed by the Grossmiths’ ability to conjure up so economically episodes of sublime absurdity. A fictive diary is in its nature one of the sparsest kinds of narrative. It occludes the author to the limit, by removing most narrative exposition—or (very important to Waugh) any overt judgments. Furthermore, just like Pooter, Waugh’s early leading male characters—Paul Pennyfeather, Tony Last, William Boot—seem stranded in an earlier era, lost in some Victorian dream among predatory modern forces: they are simple, trusting, loving, innocent, and therefore blameworthy. (There is evidence that the Grossmiths too intended to pass a more severe criticism on their hero than the modern reader can easily perceive.) Take for example the scene where Pooter naively records his loved ones’ reaction to his literary pretensions: Another thing which is disappointing to me is, that Carrie and Lupin take no interest whatever in my diary. I broached the subject at the breakfast-table to-day. I said: “I was in hopes that, if anything ever happened to me, the diary would be an endless source of pleasure to you both; to say nothing of the chance of the remuneration which may accrue from its being published.” Both Carrie and Lupin burst out laughing.[9] Is there an echo of this, at least in tone, in A Handful of Dust (1934), where the hero-victim Tony Last, landowner and cuckold, returns on Sunday morning to his house and to his adulterous wife’s horrible female friends? Tony left the church porch and made his accustomed way to the hot houses; a gardenia for himself; some almost black carnations for the ladies. When he reached the room where they were sitting there was a burst of laughter. He paused on the threshold, rather bewildered. “Come in, darling, it isn’t anything. It’s only we had a bet on what coloured buttonhole you’d be wearing and none of us won.” They still giggled a little as they pinned on the flowers he had brought them.… They left early, so as to reach London in time for dinner. In the car Daisy said, “Golly, what a house.” “Now you can see what I’ve been through all these years.” “My poor Brenda,” said Veronica, unpinning her carnation and throwing it from the window into the side of the road.[10] Of course, Tony Last is miles removed socially from Charles Pooter, and the Grossmiths’ mode is comedy whereas Waugh’s is biting satire. But, as character types, the two do have one thing in common: we are invited to see both of them as nearly extinct beings, doomed to be supplanted by a new and pushy generation operating on quite different moral principles. And, as a very self-conscious literary artist, what Waugh surely took from the Diary and applied to his own ends is its severely disciplined style, its delicately modulated tone and timing, and the subtle tricks whereby characters can be made to expose themselves in monologue or self-reported dialogue.

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