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Waugh in Pieces the Critics 98 THE CRITICS A CRITIC AT LARGE 6 WAUGH IN PIECES Cruelty and compassion mingle in the short stories of a master. BY ANTHONY LANE N July, 1956, Evelyn Waugh gave a Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh” dinner party for his daughter Te- (Little, Brown; $29.95). The title is clear, I resa. In anticipation of the event, although in the Waugh canon a short he wrote to a friend, Brian Franks, with story is not easily defined. The unfin- a description of the menu, closing with ished yet gracefully rounded tale “Work the words “Non Vintage champagne for Suspended,” for instance, which con- all but me.” Rarely has an edict been is- sumes eighty-four pages of the present sued with such a firm smack of the lips, book, feels almost a match for “The yet nothing could be sadder. At Oxford Loved One,” “Helena,” and “The Or- in the nineteen-twenties, Waugh had deal of Gilbert Pinfold”—the brisk, chosen his friends on the basis of their peppery, death-haunted trio of novellas ability to handle, or entertainingly mis- that Waugh produced in his riper years, handle, the effects of alcohol; “an excess and which are available only in individ- of wine nauseated him and this made ual volumes. He himself was a chronic an insurmountable barrier between us,” bibliophile and a connoisseur of typog- he wrote of one college acquaintance. raphy, who was admired in his youth Now, thirty years later, he would sit in for his capacity to illustrate rather than solitude, grasping his glass, bullishly compose a text, and his fussing is conta- proud that there was nobody present gious; as a rule, I am quite happy to read who deserved to share a drop. The hint any cruddy old softback with splinters is clear enough: Waugh, and Waugh of wood pulp poking out of the pages, alone, was of vintage stuff. yet I treat my early edition of “Vile The years since Waugh’s death, in Bodies,” with its vibrantly woodblocked 1966—and, in particular, the past de- title page, like a frail and endangered cade—have been marked by studious pet. The craving for Waugh can come attempts to savor his achievements. We upon one without warning, especially have had biographies in two volumes when the tide of public folly or private from Martin Stannard and in one vol- slush rises to flood level, but I resent ume from Selina Hastings; more recent, having to slake my need with an emer- and more slender still, is David Wykes’s gency Penguin. The new batch of short “Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life,” which fiction is a necessary purchase, and you bravely introduces us to the new ad- should be able to claim it against tax jective “Wavian”—helpful to scholars, as an aid to professional sanity, but perhaps, but unlikely to gain a wider the I.R.S. might frown at the luridly currency. Best of all, we have a fresh whimsical dust jacket offered by Little, gathering of primary material: “The Brown. The hushed grays of the En- PHOTOGRAPH BY IRVING PENN Evelyn Waugh in 1950: His nostalgia for abandoned glories was matched only by his relish for current catastrophe. © 1952 THE CONDÉ NAST PUBLICATIONS, LTD. 100 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 4, 1999 glish edition, published by Everyman, Waugh detested “Ulysses”; I once heard would stand you in better stead. him, during a television interview, de- The choice, nevertheless, is instruc- cry it as “gibberish” with a hard “g”; but, tive. Is Waugh in hock to the riots that as many of the stories make clear, the he records, or does he purvey a more caddish young novelist was not averse Apollonian calm? Is “Vile Bodies,” his to pilfering any modernist techniques Anglo-Saxon chronicle of the nineteen- that could be of service. The cinematic twenties, the last word in madcap, or clamor of competing voices in “Vile does it represent the lethally coherent Bodies” bears traces of the pub talk in findings of an onlooker? Max Beer- “The Waste Land”; you can still hear it bohm once labelled himself a “Tory in “Excursion in Reality,” written in Anarchist,” and the tag hangs well on 1932, with its clicking exchange of dry- Waugh, too; his nostalgia for aban- hearted lovers: doned glories (largely of his own devis- “I say, was I beastly tonight?” ing) was matched only by his relish for “Lousy.” current catastrophe. It is never enough, “Well, I thought you were lousy too.” “Never mind. See you sometime.” whatever the temptation, to mock the “Aren’t you afraid to go on talking?” age in which you live; the mockery must “Can’t, I’m afraid. I’ve got to do some continue to peal, like an echoing bell, work.” long after the objects of your scorn have “Simon, what can you mean?” been decently laid to rest. Take the Note the absence of guidelines: no cruise liner; now little more than a float- “he said,” or “she replied.” Note, more- ing mall for the retired and the tan- over, how little you need them; never in crazy, it was once a decorous addition a Waugh conversation do you have to to the Grand Tour, tricked out with just backtrack and work out who is speak- enough raffishness and cultural am- ing. (Try this some day in the privacy bition to lure the satirically minded. of your own writing, and see how hard Waugh got a whole book, “Labels,” out it is.) The tones are tethered tightly of a Mediterranean cruise that he took to character, yet at the same time they in 1929, and, four years on, he distilled seem to float upward like a plainsong the swaying, semi-nauseated atmos- of fatigue. phere of those days into six pages: The miracle of Evelyn Waugh is that withering cannot age him. The so we had champagne for dinner and were jolly and they threw paper streamers “Complete Stories” comprises nearly and I threw mine before it was unrolled and six hundred pages of weariness, with- hit Miss P. on the nose. Ha ha. So feeling drawal, disappointment, tweediness, matey I said to the steward isnt this fun and harrumphing snobbery, and flashes he said yes for them who hasnt got to clear it up goodness how Sad. of red-faced rage; by rights, the book should grind you down in gloom, in- If you had to pick a single Waugh stead of which you emerge braced and word—the syllable that registers his de- bolstered, as if by a cold shower and a meanor as reliably as the “Sir” cocktail. There are thirty-eight of Dr. Johnson—it would be “so.” tales in all, composed over fifty- Designed to establish a causal two years. Some will be famil- connection, it may equally ges- iar, having been corralled in ture toward a run of events so “Work Suspended and Other fluid that cause and effect can Stories”; others, including a be found giggling under the trove of juvenilia, were never table. The hurler of paper streamers is easy to unearth, and it is gratifying to a case in point; beneath the chirpiness, find them so readily to hand. The ear- her emotional logic is on its last legs. liest effort, written in 1910 and new to The passage comes from “Cruise: Let- me, is “The Curse of the Horse Race.” ters from a Young Lady of Leisure,” and It is thrilling stuff: it skewers a small world as cleanly as On they went aintil they were face to face anything in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”; with each other. the peliesman lept from his you could argue that comic ventrilo- horse only to be stabed to the hart by Ru- quists such as Waugh and Anita Loos pert then Tom jumped down and got Ru- pert a smart blow on the cheak. are among the most zestful descendants of Joyce—at least, of the Joyce who Not bad for a seven-year-old. Such spoke in the tongue of Molly Bloom. boyish taste for Victorian melodrama A CRITIC AT LARGE 101 was hardly uncommon; one surprising you will find a ragbag of fiction from revelation of “The Complete Stories of Waugh’s time at Oxford, including a Evelyn Waugh” is that the adult story- cod-historical romance called “Antony, teller never shook it out of his system. Who Sought Things That Were Lost.” We are so accustomed to the legend of I naturally warmed to the title, but the Waugh the patient craftsman—or, less story doesn’t really come alive until the happily, to the honeyed ruminations death rattle of the last page. Count An- in which “Brideshead Revisited” gets tony is imprisoned with his betrothed, stuck—that we tend to neglect his tal- the Lady Elizabeth: “And they made ent for whipping a tale along. There a bed of straw on the step and thus may be no unsung masterpieces in among the foul and creeping things was this latest volume, but nor is there their marriage made.” The Lady soon the slightest temptation to skip, and tires of her paramour and looks for a some of Waugh’s openings leave you replacement. The only candidate is the ravenous for further particulars: “The pockmarked jailer; she makes love to marriage of Tom Watch and Angela him in full view of the agued Antony, Trench-Troubridge was, perhaps, as who then rises up in silence and throt- unimportant an event as has occurred tles her. Five years after the creation of within living memory.” Or, “John Ver- this cheerful scene, Waugh entered the ney married Elizabeth in 1938, but holy estate of matrimony.
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