Volume 13, Number 1 EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER THE
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EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER Volume 13, Number 1 Spring, 1979 THE YEAR'S WORK IN WAUGH STUDIES By Jeffrey M. Heath University of Toronto "Quantitative judgments don't apply," says Mr. Crouchback, and so must we in considering this year's small but distinguished collection of Waugh material. Waugh scholars produced barely a score of items in 1978, but they took great pains in doing so: not only are this year's standards very high, but the degree of insight de monstrated in certain papers indicates that scholarship is homing in at last on important truths about Waugh. First, a book which I did not have the pleasure of reviewing last year. It is Donat Gallagher's Evelyn Waugh: A Little Order (London: Eyre Methuen, 1977), 192 p. Handsomely produced and unobtrusively edited, this pleasing volume "provides a conspectus of Waugh ism; of the opinions, attitudes, interests and styles most representative of the full range of his journalism." A succinct introduction of "basic information" precedes five sections de\}oted to Waugh and four of his major personalities: Myself, Aesthete, Man of Letters, Conservative, Catholic; and before each of these subsections there stands a brief preface which helps impose thematic unity on the articles grouped therein. Waugh divided his journalism into "essays" and "beastly little articles"; the former were written for intelligent people, the latter for money. Although Waugh derogated his early work, Gallagher does not suppress it, for "even his most frankly mercenary journalism is likely to contain glimmers of real interest." Gallagher divides Waugh's career into three parts. The first runs from 1928 to 1945, when Waugh wrote mainly for money and evinced an interest in food, wines, clothes and amusements, which he invested with "an importance comparable to the mystique Hemingway found in sport." A second period commences after the success of Brides Head in 1945; now Waugh could write essays without money as his prime concern. Religion and travel were now major topics, and a richer style developed. Between the second and the third periods "no clear dividing line" is evident, but by 1958 Waugh had grown poorer, and was ready to try his hand at subjects he had scorned not long before. His notoriety as "a snob and a reactionary" made him a marketable commodity, and he could now be re lied upon for offensive remarks on art, politics, and religion. Waugh planned to edit his own essays for publication. Would he have chosen the essays Gallagher chooses? Probably not; the early,livelier material would almost certainly have been ignored, whil'e the tendentious later stuff would hardly have made just compensation. It is well, therefore, that a more impartial judge has made the selection. In view of the fact that the Whitston Waugh checklist contains well over 400 items from which to' choose (more have been unearthed since). Gallagher had his work cut out for him, and the choice could not have been easy. Is Gallagher's edition truly "representative of the full range of [Waugh's] jourl)alism?" Certainly each reader will have his own reservations. Where, for example, are "Kicking Against the Goad," "Machiavelli and Utopia," "The Heart's Own Reasons," and "Bioscope?" And surely, useful as it is, an essay like "Come In" is not strictly speaking journalism. And, curiously, in a book which purports to be "a selection from his journalism," there is not a single example of the work Waugh did when he was really a journalist in Abyssinia. I have some other misgivings. Don't many of the articles look rather lonely without those they were written to confute? And what of the arrangement? Surely Waugh had many other personalities or aspects than the five Gallagher uses as thematic headings, and these should not be passed over in silence. He wrote, for example, as a "Man at Arms" too. Moverover, isn't it too simple to state that the war "made him look at life in a new way" and made him devote himself "wholeheartedly to religion for the first time?" After all, Waugh had a religious temperament from the beginning, and the battle that raged in him between the artist and the man of action was lifelong and did not end with the war. But despite these quibbles, A Little Order is a .welcome book. It groups central material into useful cate gories, and it introduces more than a little order into the chaos of our dog-eared xeroxes. In The Modes of Modern Writing, (ithaca: Cornell, 1977), David Lodge reserves a few pages for Waugh. He is, Lodge says, "an indisputably major writer" whose work differs from most modernist writing. Why? Be cause "he was a kind of conservative anarchist, and more sympathetic, therefore, than his left-wing contemporar ies to the pessimism, and despair of secular 'progress' that underlay so much modernist writing." He parted com pany from the "great Modernists" in renouncing their 'subjectivity'." He makes his presence felt "as much by his abstinence from comment as by what he actually says." Lodge gives only a sketch of Waugh here; those interested in details should see his Evelyn Waugh. -2- Now to the journals. In her excellent "Language and Charm in Brideshead Revisited," Dutch Quarterly Review, 6, 1V (Autumn 1976), 291-303, Susan Ganis Auty notes that despite his regret for his earlier linguistic "gluttony" Waugh did not expunge the ornamental passages from Brideshead because they were "an essential part of the book." Auty shows why they are essential: the ornate language contains "all the ambivalence of Waugh's simultaneous celebration and rejection of the world's charm." But, she says, Waugh by no means rejects charm out of hand: "It is Charles's susceptibility to charm, revealed in his romantic descriptions, that shows him to be capable of religious fulfillment, capable of a deep appreciation of eternal beauty." I fully agree with both of these assertions; the novel's imagery shows that Ganis is right, and she analyzes that imagery with insight and sensitivity. Through example after example she shows that Brideshead is an ornate falsehood, a repository of the charm that bamboozles Charles throughout his early life. Without faith, Brideshead is simply "a false refuge" (Ganis is especially good here) and remains that way "until conscience has been awakened." Once that happens, the force of the romantic imagery is seen to be reciprocal: "The novel is not simply exploring the conflict be· tween charm and faith; it is affirming the youthful flight into romanticism as a means to making an engagement of the spirit and thereby discovering the fulfillment of an enduring faith." Although Ganis could have taken her insight much farther, her article now stands as the most intelligent piece yet written on Brideshead. There is one curious lapse, however: surely Charles's "final salvation" does not occur in the "Epilogue," as Ganis implies, but at some unspecified moment after the end of the last chapter and before the "Epilogue." As Charles kneels in the art nouveau chapel, he has already accepted the Faith; thus his "sudden appreciation" of the flame and his "new-found sense of eternity" are not nearly as fresh as Ganis would seem to think. But her oversight is not a howler and it does not diminish this distinguished piece of work. JohnJ. Riley's "TheTwoWaughsatWar," EWN, 12, ii (Autumn 1978),3-7, and EWN, 12, iii (Winter 1978), 3-9, is an insightful discussion, in two parts, of two conflicting sides of Waugh's personality. Part I con sists of a discussion of POMF: "the novel's major conflict as externalized by Ambrose Silk and Basil Seal is really between the two forces of Waugh: the aesthetic-artistic" and the "man of action." And Part II concerns Brideshead, which is "not of the BS of Waugh but of the AS" -the aesthete. According to Riley, Brideshead is "a self-purgation of the artist ... an attempt to ... efface all that has gone before except that one justification for life itself, his conversion to Catholicism." Although Riley should glance at Auty's article to complete his picture of "self-purgation," there can be no question that he is right about Waugh's deeply-cleft nature; indeed, the split he diagnoses was evident in Waugh as early as his Heath Mount days and can be seen again in his attrac tion to Crease and Roxburgh at Lancing. Waugh repeatedly adverts to this crucial rift in his personality, and there is good reason for supposing that he never resolved it. In "Scott-King's Modern Europe: A Textual History," EWN, 12, iii (Winter 1978), 1-3, R.M. Davis states that Waugh never regarded the story as "more than a jeu d'esprit," but that the story's textual history deserves attention because it provides a microcosmic view of the process by which Waugh attained meaning in all 'of his novels. By means of a comparison of three texts Davis shows how carefully Waugh laboured over even such a slight piece as Scott-King; the ending in particular shows significant reworking and for the first time, Davis says, Waugh presents a secular hero making an affirmative rejection of the world. In "Big Screen, Little Screen: Adaptations of Evelyn Waugh's Fiction," Literature/Film Quarterly 6 (Spring 1978), 162-70, Gene D. Phillips comments on adaptations of Waugh material forcinema and television. Drawing our attention first to Waugh's scorn for films based on books, Phillips undertakes to "survey briefly how Waugh's fiction has been dealt with in both the cinema and on television in order to see which medium has been more faithful to the spirit of his work." He begins with Tony Richardson's The Loved One and vividly describes the scabrous absurdity that it became when Terry Southern's imagination got the better of his good taste: "Ad ditions to the story include a sex orgy among the caskets in the mortuary, presided over by a homosexual host ( Liberace), and a scene in which the obscenely fat mother of one of the morticians is shown having an orgasm over a series of food commercials on television." (The grossness of Southern's misunderstanding is astounding. the film becomes precisely the kind of thing the novel attacks.) When he saw what had happened, Waugh wanted his name removed from the credits, but alas, it was too late.