Al-Neelain University Graduate College English Language Department

The Wandering Modern World: The Pessimistic Vision of Evelyn Waugh

A Study of Selected Novels

A Thesis Submitted in Fulfillment of the Requirement for a P.H. Degree in English Literature

Prepared by: Jameel Ahmed Khalaf

Supervisor: Prof. Eiman El-Nour

February, 2019

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Dedication

To My

Parents, Wife, and Children

Who Were Very Patient and Helpful

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Acknowledgements

All praise and thanks are due first and foremost to Allah the Almighty, who has showered me with His favours of knowledge, health and patience, and enabled me to finish this project in the best way I can do.

My deepest thanks to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research, and Ministry of Education who have facilitated and gave me the chance to get such higher studies. The same thanks are extended to the Iraqi Cultural Office in Al-Khartoom for their help and support through all the period of my study.

There are no proper words to convey my deep gratitude and respect for the guidance, support, caring and encouragement of my research guide, Prof, Dr. Eiman Alnour, whose attention to detail, and patient gentleness made this thesis possible. I would like to extend my thanks to Al-Neelain University, the Post Graduate Section and the English Department for all the facilities and help they have provided me throughout my work.

I would also like to offer special thanks and appreciation to the staff members of the central library of Baghdad University, Al- Mostansiriya University, and the Central Library of Iraq, and the librarians of the College of Education for their assistance in providing me with the important books. The same and more thanks are extended to the staff members of the central library of Al-Neelain University for their valuable help, patience and the library facilities during my stay over there.

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Abstract

This research aims at discussing beyond the insights of the critics views regarding the wandering modern world and the causes behind the pessimistic vision of the novelist, Evelyn Waugh, about the future of Modern life. After analyzing what other critics have seen in the different novels of Waugh, efforts have been made to research upon the modern generations. In fact, the research examines the effect of the two World Wars on humanity and literature that leads to the decline of values, faith, anxiety, loss, despair and death. The writer brings out the history and destiny of the common man and mocks at the behaviour of the English people, especially the upper and the middle class, their ways of life, decline of moral values, corruption, chaos, loss of faith and identity. He reflects the conflict between order and chaos, in which brutality and incivility or discourtesies are allowed to proceed uncontrolled by authority.

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مستخلص البحث

تناول هذا البحث أثر الحربين العااليييين لىاا اليجييا انججىيا بشال لااو ولىاا انءباا بشل خاص حيث في تىك الفيرة اصبح العالم مسرح ألحداث ومآسي شنيعة ومرلبة أءت الا تغياارات رذة ااة فااي سااى ا الفاارء انوةبااي بشاال لاااو وانججىياا بشاال خاااص. هااذا الفياارة رعىت كثيرمن اللياب اليعاصر ن ليب ا ح ل انحداث اليي ظهرت بعاد الحارب وخاصاة ماا بعد الحرب العاليية انولا واثاةها لىا الحياة انرييالية , انقيصاء ة والسياساة. اهيهاا ها القىااح حاا ل اليساايقب والوساااةة والياا و والياا ت . اللاتاا سااور ا ضااا ماان اجحاااام القاايم واليباء وضياغ ان يان واله ة. و ص ة لنا ا ضا الصراع بين النظاو من رهاة والف ضاا مان رهااة اخار فااي مجييا ساااءت فياا ال حشااية الياء اة واصاابحت خااة ساايارة الحل مااة. و رك البحث ا ضا لىا األسباب وةا خيبة ام اللاتا فاي الحيااة الحد ثاة الياي فابات فيهاا ك اليقاليد العر قة واليباء السامية وانخالق الحييدة اضافة الا اليفلك العائىي واليجييعاي الذ قاء انجسان الحد ث لىدخ ل في ءوامة اللاّبة ومى الحياة. و عرض لنا اللات ا ضاا ,مان خالل ةوا اتا, الوياجة ال ورية واجيشاة البربر ة في مجيي دلي اجاا مجييا مثقا للان فاي الحقيقة ه مجيي وحشي لقيم خالي مان أ ةوابا ء نياة أو لائىياة. أصابح انجساان الغرباي يينا الياضي الذ حي ك معاجي الحياة انجساجية. وباليالي اصي بويبة ام اجعلست في ك ر اج الحياة الد نية وانرييالية وانقيصاء ة. وأخاذ فضا اليا ت بادن مان العاي فاي الحياااة الحد ثااة اليااي لاام جااد فيهااا ساا اليىاا والف ضااا فااي لااالم ماااء خااالي ماان الج اجاا الروحية والعامفية.

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Table of Contents

Titles Page No

Dedication …………………………………………………………………….I

Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………. II

Abstract ………………………………………………………………………III

Abstract (Arabic) …………………………………………………………….IV

Table of Contents ……………………………………………………………V

Chapter One Introduction P - 1 1.0 Overview…………………………………………………………...……. 2

1.1 Statement of the problem ……………………...………………………...2

1.2 The Objectives of The Study …………………………………………… 4

1.3 The Hypothesis …………………….………………………………….... 4

1.4 Questions of the study ………..………………………………………… 5

1.5 Methodology of the study ………………………………………………. 6

1.6 The Significance of the Study ...………………………………………… 6

1.7 The Impact of The Two World Wars on Humanity and Literature ..…… 7

1.8 Evelyn Waugh's Life ……….…………………………………………… 20

1.9 Evelyn Waugh's literary Career …………………………………………. 24

1.10 Waugh's War Experience & Works …………………………………… 33

Chapter Two Literature Review and Theoretical Frame Work P-41 2.0 Modern Literature and Modernism ……………………………………… 42

2.1 The Previous Studies about the Topic ...…………………………………. 47

2.2 The Theoretical Study ...…………………………………………………. 54

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Chapter Three The Author's Views of Modern Life & A Brief Summary of the Novels under Study P-62 3.0 Evelyn Waugh's Views of Modern Life ………………………………. 63

3.1 A Brief Summary of the Novels under Study ……………………….... 66

3.1.1 Decline and Fall (1928) ……………………………………………... 66

3.2 A Handful of Dust (1934) ……………………………………………... 70

3.3 Love Among the Ruins (1953) …………………………………………. 77

Chapter Four Analysis of The Novels P-80

4.0 The Century of The Common Man ..………………………………….. 81

4.1 A Gothic Man at the Hands of Savages ……………………………… 105

4.2 The Modern man's Image …………………………………………….. 133

4.3 The Image of Death …………………………………………………... 144

4.4 The Image of Love ………………………………………………….... 152

Chapter Five Conclusion P-157 5.0 Conclusion .…………………………………………………………… 158

5.1 Inferences and recommendations …………………………………….. 162

Bibliography P-171

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Chapter one

Introduction

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Chapter One Introduction 1.0 overview

Evelyn Waugh ( 1903 – 1966 ) was born in London into a comfortable middle class literary family. In his fiction, Waugh shows the diverse difference between the old and new values in his own society, and reveals in stark reality a society and culture rotting from inside. He sees modern life as one in which all values have cheapened and collapsed. That is why he is considered a prophet of the same spirit of disillusionment that can be seen not only in the fiction of his contemporary novelists but in most poetry of T.S. Eliot especially in his pioneer poem The West Land.

His fame continued to grow between the two world wars. His novels were based on sharp satires of disorderliness, chance events, and the collapse of values and meaning in modern life. He saw the struggle as quite simply between truth, order and civilization, and their opposite, disorder and barbarism.

By using the element of extravagant farce and caricature in his works, Waugh, can drive comedy from the cruelty of tragedy. To him the world is not a composite of visible facts; it is a "bodiless harlequinade" , where individual is still swamped in the mob and swept along by circumstance over which he has no control.

1.1 Statement of the problem

Waugh's art in general, and his refusal to the bitter facts of the decline of values in his society in particular, is submitted to study and analysis. This thesis will attempt to focus on the purpose and motive

9 behind Waugh's pessimistic vision where he presents a world unable to be corrected, especially when the Catholic God and the Kingdom of heaven have been ignored and abandoned by the modern secular society embodied in the absence of moral standards in the modern world!

Anyone can wonder, is not such a world, described by such talented, genius and prophetic writer, is perfectly and unfortunately the world we are living now? Even his warnings, about the cultureless modern world and the appearance of a new class of educated but rootless people, are clear and tangible not only in the period of postwar world but also in the time we live in nowadays! In fact, the writer saw not only his own time, but ours also; both of them were afraid and anxious about the future because he imagined the possibility of continuation of the evil of his own time to the next. Waugh understood how the moral relativism had brought the bad people and the totalitarians to power!!!

Waugh portrays the modern world as anarchic and incoherent represented by what are called the Bright Young People who are wandering aimlessly in their destructive lifestyle. Waugh expresses his frustration and disgust with all the parties, sterility, futility, and shallowness of the modern English society. He shows his respect for the past and revealed his ill-feeling towards the modern world and he portrays modern life as hopelessly violent and absurd, while the vanished past is introduced as the most ordered and reasonable one.

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1.2 The Objectives of The Study

1- The study aims at clarifying Waugh's realistic, satirical, and pessimistic vision of modern life which can be achieved through a precise analytical study of selected novels which often feature an empty-headed society.

2- The study concentrates on the spiritual truth which is considered as the highest one for a world in which people are spiritually dead though they are physically alive. For instance the socialites represented by the Bright Young People were wandering in a destructive lifestyle that suggests unending chaos in the aftermath of the Great War.

3- The study also tries to show the reasons behind the writer's pessimistic vision of a world full of sterility, futility, and boredom which is represented by the characters of the novels and how they indulged in their numberless parties, immoral love affairs and infidelity. Waugh expresses his frustration and disgust with all the parties and shallowness of these people and he tries to reflect the degeneration of moral values, the dullness of life, and the disintegration of the social relations among those Bright Young People in particular and the modern English society in general.

1.3 The Hypothesis

This study goes forward from the assumption that Evelyn Waugh is concerned so much with the decay of culture and the loss of the individual identity in the modern western world due to the hard impact of the Two World Wars. According to Waugh, the trouble about the world today is that there's not enough religion in it. So, on this account, and as a result of the futile and absurd life of the period,

11 after the Great War, the decline of moral values, the loss of faith and identity, the boredom of life, the sterility of the social relations and the disintegration of the English family, Waugh directs his sharp satire against these modern phenomena.

Therefore, Waugh completely believed that the best cure for these phenomena is the restoration of the old traditions. He believed that the individual, without tradition and without guidance, will be lost and at every moment he will try to reinvent himself. Such philosophy is clear and tangible in the life of Paul Pennyfeather the hero of Decline and Fall who is suffering from the lack of any traditional tools without which they cannot achieve any self–restraint. The world that has been portrayed in most of Waugh's works is a degenerative one; scene after scene Waugh satirically tried to evoke indiscipline, infidelity and self-indulgence in the form of illegal sex, drinking, drug- taking, self-serving hypocrisy and theft.

Waugh tried to convey a sense of modern disorder and explain its causes. He believed that modernity became the main danger to individuality which cannot be apart from the roots of traditional morality and religious conventions. Without such roots, no real personality can flourish.

1.4 Questions of the study

1- In what way has Evelyn Waugh presented the impacts of the two world wars upon the western world in general and the English society in particular?

2- How are religious values dealt with by Evelyn Waugh in his novels?

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3- To what extent has Evelyn Waugh portrayed the absurdity and shallowness of the modern world in his novels?

4- In what way has Evelyn succeeded in picturing out the bitter fact of the decline of values in his society?

5- What are Evelyn's views on morality and socioeconomic status of the western and other contemporary communities?

1.5 Methodology of the study

In the current study, the analytical descriptive and evaluative method will be used to critically mark out the dimensions of the criteria represented in Waugh's philosophical statements embodied in the behaviour of different characters in the select novels which have been selected for analysis.

1.6 The Significance of the Study

The study will bring out an accurate multidimensional sketch of the loss of faith and values in modern life. I hope it would be a helpful guide to any researcher who wants to study the real dimensions behind Waugh's depressed vision.

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1.7 The Impact of The Two World Wars on Humanity and Literature

On August 4, 1914, clouds gathered in the Island on which the sun never sets. The doorstep was the First World War, "the war [which was] assumed to be short lived, adventurous and a kind of moral purgative rather than a physical blood-letting"(Bell, 1980: 83). People were enthusiastic, driven by a high sense of patriotism, and men rushed to enlist in a rightful war between good and evil.

Armies were mobilized and the war started. After fighting for a number of months, both confronting armies were introduced to trench warfare, "an almost entirely new method in which all old theories of war were discarded"(Girling, 1978: 547) which lasted until the end of the war. Soon, men, seeing their comrades massively slaughtered and experienced the horrors of unprecedented destructive war, started doubting their cause and felt to have been cheated and trapped into an action that would be man's inhumanity. It had been a war which turned all traditional concepts, views, and values upside-down.

The First World War was different from all previous wars. It witnessed enormous destructiveness of the newly invented and perfected weapons like combat planes, tanks, machine guns, modern artillery, armored vehicles, and the use of poison gases. The extent to which all these means were highly destructive can be measured through many examples of battles that had taken place during the First World War, one of which the battle of the Somme—the most furious battle in which over "20,000 British soldiers were killed,"(May, 1995: 358) on its first day only, let alone the German casualties. "The technologized slaughter of that war revealed the immense capacity for destruction,"(Boehmer, 1995: 127) which had shaken the sense of

14 security and an over optimistic hopeful view of the promising future of the twentieth century.

That war had involved almost everyone; armies, non-combatant civilians, and even neutrals that were targeted far behind the front lines by submarines and aerial attacks. "The war exceeded, in the scale of its operation, the number of its casualties, and the total of its costs, any previous known human conflict"(Girling,1978: 568). It was a global war that developed into a world conflagration. The First World War was dissociated from geography and culture, involving populations of many nations over different continents into a war in which all weapons and means were allowed.

Starting with army men who were, and usually are, the first to experience and understand what war could mean, the trenches, front experience, and battles had changed men, who survived the war, completely. Those men, from both conflicting sides, were horrified by the disgusting methods of war conducting, where they suffered from living in grave-like trenches among dead decaying corpses of their comrades that they loved and shared life together. The tough horrors of the trenches did their work perfectly on those men killing them psychologically and mentally. The obscenity of death, the false ideals and morals, and the lost hopes, all helped to draw clearly the gloomy future of an insecure man and domineering pessimistic shadows spreading their wings over many generations to come.

Living in danger, violence, battle chaos, death, the endless casualties, and the loss of friends, men were unable to endure any more. All that emotional stress created and shaped men with a variety of psychological and mental diseases like shell-shock, neurasthenia, nervous breakdown, and emotional disturbance as well as the large

15 numbers of soldiers that were suffering and had to be hospitalized for a long time for frostbite, pneumonia, and trench foot, the latter having "put more men out of action than mortars, or machine-gun fire," (Ambrose, 1998: 260) leaving them disabled physically with a great feeling of indignation and hatred watered by the war's red rain to everything around them even themselves, pushing lots of them to commit suicide.

However, it did not take those men more than a year to feel disillusioned and misled, that governments were compelled to order a compulsory conscription, when the voluntary system proved to be inequitable, forcing "men to join the army whether they wanted or not" (McDowall, 1989: 160). The war was so immense that it gave way to the writers to write about the political, social, ideological, intellectual, and artistic concepts, making the 1918 world emerge entirely different from the one before 1914.

Actually, the destruction caused by the First World War was, by all means, disastrous and terrible. It affected man and nature alike. And when the armistice was announced in November 1918, people cheered up and congratulated each other believing that the Great War has ended, and that there will never be another, Since it was a war to end all wars. May be they either believed or wanted to believe so. Whatever the truth was, they were soon to face what they feared and prayed not to happen again.

The period after the First World War was burdened with a number of tragic memories due to the severe and horrible scenes of death and destruction. In July 1917, the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens visited the battlefields of north–eastern France to examine the need for making a monument to immortalize the huge number of war-dead.

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After he had seen the place, he described it to his wife in a tone of horrible surprise:

What humanity can endure and suffer is beyond belief’…‘the battlefields – the obliteration of all human endeavour and achievement and the human achievement of destruction is bettered by the poppies and wild flowers that are as friendly to an unexploded shell as they are to the leg of a garden seat in Surrey. (Quoted in Sanders, 2000: 506)

At last the world was back in peace and the time supposed to be an eternal one. All were full of hope for a bright future to come after long years of agony caused by the loss of the dear loved ones, sons, fathers, brothers, and friends. Finally, the servicemen, who survived the war, came back home with a lot of dreams to be fulfilled in a land fit for heroes, as the ruling Labour Party promised the desperate British people, and the exhausted servicemen who were "a generation… who, even though they may have escaped the war shells, were destroyed by it" (Sanders, 2000: 506). "The post-war period was haunted by long memories, some tender, some angry, most sickening" (Sanders 506). The memory of the trench and the front of fighting, to a large extent, effected on servicemen's minds who were obsessed by nightmares of battles up to the Second World War, visualizing idealism and the bright future had turned into a bitter disillusionment. At the same time, the matter was not different to those who were born in the early years of the century "that the shock of the war, impinging on them in their adolescence, and the disillusion of the post-war years, [had] turned them against the large claims and confident certainties" (Hewitt, 1988: 198).

Families were scattered and separated, "thrown into poverty by the loss of a principal breadwinner to the armed forces,"(Lawrence,

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1994: 157) either by going off to war and getting killed or by preferring to stay at home and getting hanged. Besides, "the cost of the war had led an enormous increase in taxation," (McDowall,1989: 167)which caused in turn, an increase in the cost of living, making life harder, that there was a threat of famine in many areas as it happened in Russia.

It is worth mentioning that the major difference between the world before 1914 and that after 1918 was security. Actually, a lot of people "developed doubts about the methods and results of the First World War, [and] became concerned that new technology [in the form of chemical warfare and military aviation] would make another such war even more destructive" (Ceadel, 2008: 221). That, of course, was not the end, and population in all over the world had to go through another traumatic experience that was unemployment. By that, unemployment had become widely spread in many places, especially in most of the industrial areas. "The futility of the Great War now seemed ever more apparent, and the post-war generation felt… [much more] betrayed" (Bradbury, 1994: 142).

However, that was not the ideal picture of the Utopian world that a large range of people had in mind for the post-war world. Therefore, strikes became common and frequent. Distaste and distress were the general dominating mood.

"It was only natural that men should protest against such conditions. On the Armistice Day 1922 some 25,000 unemployed Londoners attached themselves to the official ceremony. They carried at their heads a large wreath inscribed: 'from the living victims — the unemployed — to our dead comrades, who died in vain' (May, 1995: 376).

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The years of the Great Depression, like the years of the Great War, had been an intense experience that had imposed numerous forms of living and shook the modern man's social, psychological, economic, and political standards. Army men, after suffering every minute of hard times in their service days, came back home in post- war world to suffer unemployment and poverty, "seeing post-war hope turned into hopelessness as government failed to grapple effectively with slump and unemployment" (Blamires, 1983: 115).

Undoubtedly, unemployment had made a great effects upon different aspects of society. Those effects "were marked on the faces of unemployed people and their families and [were] in a wide range of fictional and documentary sources"(Ceadel, 2008: 203). As years passed, unemployment pushed populations deeper and deeper into post-war chaos and confusion "undermining wartime promises of a land fit for heroes" (Ceadel 227). Thrown into poverty, living standards for many families deteriorated, like the deterioration of the health of the unemployed and their families, who were leading a hand- to-mouth existence. In fact, "it is particularly the women, the wife with a number of young children, who[usually] reacts most tragically to… [such] situation[s]" ( May, 1995: 376). This deterioration could be obviously displayed by the changes in infant and maternal mortality rates.

However, the number of unemployed men on the dole were increasing every day. Eventually, when many people were left workless, children had to skip education, which is an important stage in their life, to be exploited at work, instead of getting enough learning to provide them with the best future occupations. Moreover, constant need, hunger, disease, and poverty turned a lot of people into

19 criminals, greedy, selfish, and violent. Consequently, unemployment was undoubtedly a powerful cause of the psychological breakdown that the post-war modern man was frequently undergoing.

A number of years later, when the Wall Street American stock exchange collapsed, the Depression was confirmed. The 1930— described as the devil's decade, the decade of the Great Slump, or the dislocated, lost decade—was the hardest decade according to which "Europe entered an era of new and terrible disorder"(Bradbury, 1994: 143). That disorder led to great political changes in the world, like the powerful new Nazi and Fascist governments which were taking over in Germany, Italy, Austria, and Spain that led to a second world war.

The Great Depression as it came to be known in the United States was the biggest economic crises in history. It lasted for about a decade and led to poverty, hunger and unemployment all over the world. In September 1929 the prices of goods began to fall and on October 29, 1929 they completely collapsed on this day which is known as the Black Tuesday. It was a worldwide economic downturn and the largest and most severe economic depression in the 20th century. Many European countries did not have enough money. They had to pay a lot back to the USA because the Americans helped to win the war. Under such a critical economic situation the British people suffered much as the others in the Continent. Sherman and Salisbury states that:

One British woman echoed the feelings of many: “these last few years since I've been out of the mills … I've got no spirit for anything”. Masses of people sank into poverty, and malnutrition and diseases spread. Families suffered from new tensions as men lost their traditional role as

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breadwinners … Scenes of despair could be found everywhere. (Quoted in Sherman and Salisbury, 2004: 784)

The First World War had left a deep wound on the body of all humanity. Therefore, the age following this war was really an age of loss and despair. It was an important turning point from certainty to uncertainty, from order to chaos. For example Evelyn Waugh once sighed for "Something that went out of the world in 1914, at least for one generation." (Waugh, Diaries: 147). While W. H. Auden called it an age of Anxiety, as he makes that clear in his last longest poem The Age of Anxiety which begins in fear and doubt, and its four protagonists sharing some comfort in their catastrophe. Then, the rise to power of Mussolini and Fascism, and of Hitler and Nazism increasingly led people to think that the danger of a new world war was inevitable; the Spanish Civil War of 1937 gave credit to that threat. Consequently, at such critical period of the appearance and clashing of different ideologies, society looked tired, sick and ailing and man looked hopelessly for peace and content. "The real circumstances between the wars were shockingly unkind. Violence on a grand scale, the loss of identity, and the increasing mechanization of society left the modern individual in a dilemma" (Lisa Colletta, 2003: 9).

On the other hand, Communism and Catholicism were increasingly singled out as the suitable cures for the sufferings and sickness of the generation. Therefore, many novelists and poets of the thirties saw in Communism the practical solution for the ailments of the age. Step by step, the concept of the ideal society and revolution gripped the literary imagination of the young generation, like George Orwell, Auden, and Stephen Spender; while Catholicism was the less popular alternative mostly due to crisis of belief and loss of faith. But,

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Graham Greene was one of the famous novelist of this period who asserted the validity and the necessity of religious belief; sharing the same beliefs with his friend Evelyn Waugh.

After the painful loss of German in the First World War, Germany was depressed and powerless. This change left the German people with a severe injured pride. They were oppressed and betrayed by the victors. Accordingly, most of the Germans lost their money and property. Then, they were forced to endure high taxes to repay the Allies. They were in a state of anger and despair. As a result and due to a lot of problems whether politic, economic or social, the German government of that time was unstable and unable to deal with these problems. Such difficult and critical circumstances with the bitterness of defeat in the First World War encouraged Hitler to move against Poland. On 1st September 1939, German troops invaded Poland which was considered the signal for the beginning of the Second World War. Tragically, this war continued for six long years and covered the globe as never before. Sherman and Salisbury points out that:

At dawn on September 1, the German launched on all – out attack on Poland by land, sea and air. Hitler remained convinced that France and Britain would not go to war over Poland. He was wrong. Two days later, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. In a poem titled “SEPTEMBER 1, 1939,” poet W.H. Auden (1907 – 1973) moaned that:

The unmentionable odor of death Offends the September night World War II had begun (Sherman and Salisbury, 2004: 794).

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The supposed peace was interrupted and troubled again, and the twenty long years of starvation, mass misery, mass unemployment, and mass fear had to stop for a while on the same door–step. It was war again and it was more destructive and horrible than the previous one. In fact, this war, the World War II, was different than its predecessor. This war was more dangerous to the lives of people and more destructive because it was more advance in the use of technology and the weapons of mass destruction. The whole world had become the war zone.

In fact, the use of modern technology and modern weapons has changed the concept of war zone. In this war, as in most modern wars, there is no limited battlefield; the whole world is a battlefield for such wars. "The Great War of 1914–1918 can seem more like a European Civil War in comparison"(Mackay, 2009: 1). This war stressed the relationship between technology with barbarism as it was thought by a lot of historians and psychologists in the middle of the twentieth century; such relationship has become highly charged mark of a psychological, moral, and the occurrent paralysis of thought. The philosopher Simone Weil who wrote out of the experience of being inside a war; stressed that:

The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward … The Second World War, perhaps more than any war before it, raises the question of how war can be held in the mind when the mind itself is under siege; of what it means to experience a trauma so unrelentingly forcefully that cannot be grasped consciously. (Quoted in Stonebridge, 2009: 194)

The Germans launched massive air attacks in July 1940, to destroy and shatter the British forces and its infra-structures, and

23 bombing London every night for two months. (Sherman and Salisbury 794 – 795). Describing the difficult British situation and Churchill's plans Martin Gilbert states that:

In the disastrous summer of 1940, with the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk (accompanied by a massive loss of equipment) and with the intensification of German bombing of factories and airfields throughout Britain, Churchill and those in the inner circle of government knew the precise details of Britain's weakness on land, sea, and air. Despite every effort being made to increase war production, Churchill knew that it was only through a massive contribution by the United States to every facet of Britain's war – making arsenal that Britain could remain effectively at war. From the first to the last days of his premiership, the link to the United States was central to Churchill's war policy. (Gilbert, 2003: 45)

Accordingly, as the war machine continued; the sufferings, horrors, miseries, hunger, emotional stress, death, physical and psychological diseases increased everywhere, whether they were the military men or the civilians all became the scapegoat of the adventures of the statesmen; in addition to the mass pressure of the war propaganda. The globe became a theater of the most disgust bloody show, where millions of people suffered, tortured or killed in three major theaters: the Soviet Union, Western Europe and the Mediterranean, and the Pacific. It is said that one of the largest, bloodiest battles occurred in the Soviet Union in which nine millions soldiers were involved on August 1942. The soldiers of the two world wars may have been largely conscripts, but they were soldiers nonetheless; World War II, on the other hand, was very substantially a

24 civilian experience, and, in the eloquent words of the historian Tony Judt, "experienced not as a war of movement and battle but as a daily degradation, in the course of which men and women were betrayed and humiliated, forced into daily acts of petty crime and self- abasement, in which everyone lost something and many lost everything" (Mackay, 2009: 7).

However, one of the most disgusting, and most horrible fact about the Second World War was the wholesale killing of prisoners of war. In his non-fiction book Citizen Soldiers: The U S Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany June 7, 1944-May 7, 1945, published in 1997, Stephen E. Ambrose tells the real story of World War II from the viewpoint of the men and women who fought it. Ambrose portrays grotesquely the atrocity and the absurdity of such bloody war; for example, through the following conversation between a Polish and an American officer, one can imagine how brutal and tragic that war was.

Polish Captain: "Here are your prisoners."

Waters (an American Captain): "I don't want them."

Polish Captain: "But I must leave them, with you. Those are my orders."

Waters: "I still don't want them. Get them out of here."

(Waters' orders were to accept them, but he had been told to expect 1,500; in fact there were only a couple of hundred).

Polish Captain: "But I must still leave them with you."

Waters: "Well, you were supposed to have 1,500 prisoners. Where are they?" Polish Captain: "They are dead. We shot them. These are all that are left."

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Waters: "Then why don't you shoot these too?"

A pause then

Waters corrected himself: "No you can't do that."

Polish Captain: "Oh, yes we can. They shot my countrymen."

He took Waters by the arm and escorted him away

from the others. Then he said, "Captain, we can't shoot them. We are out of ammunition." (Ambrose, 1998: 105)

As a matter of fact, "both the American and the German armies outlawed the shooting of unarmed prisoners. Both sides did it frequently, but few court-martials were convened for men charged with shooting prisoners," (Ambrose 352). These are the consequences of wars no matter when or where. Justice can never be monitored for such similar cases. Actually, the Second World War was more destructive than the First World War because the military industrial progress and the invention of more destructive weapons. "The weapons used by the forces were more complicated than those used between 1914 and 1918", (May, 1995: 402) like aerial weapons, submarines, and U-boats which were used much more actively for the first time.

Moreover, war was more savage in the second conflict than it was in the first one, because there was no distinction between civilians and army men by those mass destructive means, especially air-power. The two world wars had, in unprecedented way, involved armies and population alike, though in "the Second World War… civilians were involved every bit as much as members of the armed forces" (May, 1995: 400). The most obvious example of the involvement of civilians was the bombardment of Hiroshima when "USAAFB 29, Enola gay, dropped the first atomic bomb, nicknamed 'Little Boy' on the Japanese

26 city of Hiroshima [on 6 Aug., destroying 10 km of the city, to be followed by the] second atomic bomb, nicknamed 'Fat Man', [which was] dropped on Nagasaki [9 Aug. 1945]" (Cook and Stephenson, 1998: 281) at which about 110,000 people died immediately and a number of thousands later, because of the after effect.

The period of modern life has been the setting of two great and deadly events: the First and the Second World Wars. These wars brought anxiety, loss, despair and death. The different ages of human life have witnessed different changes and developments, each period has left special imprint, on all aspects of life with distinguished characteristics. Many writers emerged during each period and penned their feelings and ideas about the war and its impact on humanity in general.

1.8 Evelyn Waugh's Life

Evelyn Waugh Arthur St. John Waugh (1903 - 1966) was born in the London suburb of Hampstead (Crabbe, 1988: 2). He came from a successful middle class – his paternal grandfather had been a prosperous doctor; his mother belonged to an old family of professionals and military men. Both parents came from rural families who were associated with, but were not of aristocracy. Since early childhood, Evelyn Waugh showed symptoms of literary talent. In Waugh's writing of earliest surviving example, 'the Curse of The Horse Race' written in 1910, one can see, despite the spelling mistakes, the beginning of clarity, understanding, and the ironic tone which became his landmark:

" I bet you 500 pounds, I'll win. The speaker was Ruport a man of about 25 he had a dark bushy mistrash and

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flashing eyes. I should not trust to much on your horse said Tom for he had not the sum to spear" (Crabbe, 1988: 3).

A second impulse, that effectively played a considerable role in Waugh's life, was religion. This was due to the family's observance of religious duties, and the influence of his deeply religious nurse whom he loved and imitated. Besides, Waugh himself was a regular attendant of church and its ceremonies until he became an altar boy and turned his bed room to a small altar (Crabbe, 3). This interest in religion and its rituals came to occupy an important position in Waugh's life, not because it marked the beginning of his sense of the significant of the supernatural or the mysterious, but also determined eventually the choice of his public school (Crabbe 3-4) .

In fact, Waugh's relationship with Acton was very interesting. Acton added many good literary devices to Waugh’s writing, extended his horizons and encouraged his talent to depend more on his artistic judgment. "A year younger than Waugh, Acton brought to Oxford a much more fully formed knowledge of the arts and commitment to modernism." (Patey, 2001: 10). Acton encouraged Waugh to read and study the works of Ronald Firbank (1880–1926), Edith Sitwell (1887– 1964), T. S. Eliot (1888– 1965), Ezra Pound (1885–1972), Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), and Earnest Hemingway (1899–1961). Due to his influence and the close relationship Waugh dedicated his first novel Decline and Fall (1928) to Acton ‘in homage and affection’. "Waugh was enchanted: ‘Harold led me far away from Crease to the baroque and the rococo and the Waste Land’." (Patey 11)

In the early times at Oxford Waugh made good use of his friends who wrote gossip columns like Tom Driberg (1905-1976), Patrick Balfour (1904-1976), and reviews such as Peter Quennell

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(1905-1993), Peter Fleming (1907-1971), Cyril Connolly (1903-1974), Henry Green (1905-1973), Anthony Powell (1905-2000), Maurice Bowra (1898-1971), Christopher Hollis (1902-1977) and his lover and close friend Alastair Graham. After leaving Oxford without a degree Waugh had to do a job of school master in 1925, at Arnold House Preparatory School in North Wales which was a bad experience for the rebellious young Waugh who refused to live an orderly life. In his diary, Waugh expressed his disgust of being in Wales which seemed to him as if it were Africa "Everyone in Wales has black spittle and whenever he meets you say “borra–da” and spits. I was frightened at first but after a time I became accustomed to it." (Diaries 201). In a letter from Wales Waugh mentioned to his friend Acton, in Feb. 1925, that "… a bad school as schools go but it is a sorry waste of time & energy. I do not think that I am good at teaching–at any rate I have not succeeded so far in getting any idea into anyone's head." (Letters 31).

However, Arnold House was the original episode of Llanabba School in his first novel Decline and Fall. In A Little Learning Waugh portrayed himself as a detested schoolteacher at Arnold House, depressing and alienated. He hated everything even himself. "Waugh felt like a criminal transported to an output of civilization." (Stannard, 1986: 108). Now he was fully depressed and disillusioned, he saw no light at the end of the tunnel. The future looked even darker than before, so he started thinking of destroying himself. Suicide seemed the only logical option to put an end for such a depressed life, especially after he received the news from Italy saying that there was no hope for the job he was waiting for. But though most critics agreed that no one knew how serious was Waugh’s intention to kill himself, but he was making it look perfectly clear in his last autobiography, A

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Little Learning. Patey remarked that "This story is not really quite true but I have recounted it in so many letters that I have begun to believe it." (Patey 19). In a brilliant literary passage and comically ironic way Waugh mentioned in his last book, A Little Learning: The First Volume of an Autobiography, how the suicide was let down by a jellyfish:

One night, soon after I got the news from Pisa, I went down alone to the beach with my thoughts full of death. I took off my clothes and began swimming out to sea… I left a note with my clothes, the quotation from Euripides about the sea which washes away all human ills...I swam slowly out but, long before I reached the point of no return, the Shropshire Lad was disturbed by a smart on the shoulder. I had run into a jelly-fish. A few more strokes, a second more painful sting. The placid waters were full of the creatures….I turned about, swam back…to the sands….With some difficulty I dressed and tore into small pieces my pretentious classical tag, leaving them to the sea….Then I climbed the sharp hill that led to all the years ahead. (Waugh, A Little Learning: 229-230)

Henceforth, he left his job in Wales and tried working in another school. In March 1927 he joined school in Notting Hill, but he stayed there for a very short time, because he did not like it. He described it in his Diaries, on 28 February, as a very bad place to work in "The School in Notting Hill is quite awful. All the masters drop their aitches & spit in the fire and scratch their genitals. The boys have close cropped head & steel rimmed spectacles wound with worsted. They pick their noses & scream at each other in a Cockney accent." (Diaries, 281). So his new career as a schoolmaster came to an end in April 1927. Finally, Evelyn got a job as a reporter for the Daily

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Express, but it also seemed that he was not satisfied with it, as he commented "I don't know how much I shall like that,’ but it will be worth trying." (Sykes, 1985: 111). Acton described the four years of Waugh's life from 1924 to 1928 as Waugh's ‘Destoievski period’, in the sense that through these years Waugh led "an aimless round of occasional employment, parties in London, weekend trips back to Oxford…afternoons whiled away in the cinema, and, drunkenness." (Patey 16).

Hence, after focusing on Waugh's early life, one can feel that, though, he had been born into a comfortable middleclass family, but when he became a man he moved among the British upper classes. He financed his pleasures by becoming one of the best–paid authors of his generation. He appeared to be an example of success in the press circles. Though he was well known as a funny man but, only his closest friends knew of his depression and fear of failure.

1.9 Evelyn Waugh's literary Career

In July 1927, he started writing his first work, a life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In fact, Rossetti, His Life and Works, is the first real attempt for Waugh in writing literary books. It is a book in which Waugh reflects his fascination and appreciation for the Pre– Raphaelites; praising their approach as painters, scribes, writers and craftsmen. Through this book Waugh early declared his admiration for traditional Arts. The book was published in the Spring of 1928. In a letter to Waugh, after reading this book, his friend Acton encouraged and praised Waugh observing:

I can now say that I have read and honestly enjoyed your Rossetti. Your maturity of mind alarms and terrifies me, it

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is so tremendously able and considered….As it is you have written in your own genuine and agreeable style, and dealt quietly and eloquently with your subject….All my congratulations. I am sure it will get the success it deserves, and it must have been hard work writing. (Acton,2002: 69)

With the publishing of Rossetti in 1928 Waugh's name appeared now as a writer to be taken seriously. Commenting on Waugh’s style of writing this book, Sykes remarked that "The style shows a leap towards maturity, though he had not yet attained mastery. He was always to use occasionally the grand manner, the purple patch, but with more discipline than he showed in Rossetti." (Sykes, 1995: 123). In one of the parties of the Bright Young People, he was introduced to Evelyn Gardner. She was young of the same age of Waugh, beautiful and a frivolous girl, from the Herberts, the high class family. They married on June 27th 1928. As a new married couple, they travelled together in a four– month Mediterranean tour to Paris, Monte Carlo, Malta, Haifa, Port Said in Egypt, Cairo, Algiers, Barcelona, Gibraltar, Cyprus, Italy, Spain, Athens, Turkey, Soviet Union and other countries.

By mid–April 1929, they returned to England, and Waugh felt that he came back richly loaded with travel experiences and material for his writings. The result of this Mediterranean journey is a travel book, under the title Labels (1930), with a description of his travels and comments on the places he visited. In this book Waugh portrays different types of modern travellers and different places from Europe to the Middle East and North Africa; from Egyptian pyramids and Italian churches to Maltese sailors and Moroccan merchants; places that seem to be the archetype of a remarkable old civilization. After this as he sailed around the Mediterranean Waugh’s pen put down

32 beautiful description for everything he saw in addition to a lot of camera pictures to give an entertaining portrait of a long lost world of traveling we are longing for nowadays. His tales depict beautiful pictures of a lost world that has gone, where the places he visited already "fully labelled" in people's minds as he said. "With 'Labels,' Mr. Waugh has definitely established his reputation as a minor critic and master of modern manners and a very amusing and intelligent writer." (Unsigned Review, ‘New Statesman’18 October 1930 in Stannard, 2002: 116). While Sykes remarked that what made this book a unique one among the other six books of Evelyn’s travel books was that he fictionalized it: "It was the first of the six travel books he wrote, and unique among them for its artful mixture of factual record and fiction." (Sykes, 1985: 151).

Waugh noticed that a lot of things in the Londoners social life were changing. He found scenes of disorderly social extravagance, and society had become the main topic of news for the gossip column. New design clothes had appeared. It was the period of short skirts, cloche hats, and shingled hair. The cocktail and bottle parties were common and modern fashions elaborate fancy–dress parties became widespread. Negro jazz singers ran a chain of illegal clubs. The parties became more aggressive and wilder, the drinking heavier and the divorce rate became much higher. A class of rich people appeared who were willing to do anything even about sexual affairs and would talk openly which was contrary to the conservative time of the Victorians. New bohemian life became familiar, there was drugs abuse among the Bright Young People1, their disorderly life was the material of

1 The Bright Young People is a nickname given to a group of young aristocrats and socialites who constituted the ’lost generation‘ of the period between the Two World Wars 1920s and 30s in London.

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Waugh's next novel Vile Bodies. Waugh’s wife fell in love with one of his friends named John Heygate an active member of the Bright Young People.

Consequently his marriage failed and it was a great turning point in his life. "He felt lost again in a world where he believed that, at last, after a painful struggle, he had found safety. He fell into a state of absolute despair. Some of his friends even feared for his sanity." (Sykes, 1985: 139-140). David Wykes observed that "the collapse of this marriage was the most important event of his life….Certainly it was a trauma that left a mark on everything of any importance that he wrote thereafter"(Wykes, 1999: 63-64).

On the other hand due to such difficult circumstances, Evelyn Waugh had to stop working on his next novel Vile Bodies for a while; and so he took to journalism. Hence, though he succeeded in gathering up the remaining part of his shattered self-esteem, but such hardness, bitterness and disillusionment was never absent from his next books. Ian Littlewood noted that "It was probably the most painful experience of Waugh's life, and its shock waves can be felt through successive novels for the rest of his career." (Littlewood, 1983: 11). Thus, Evelyn had to start a new life and to regain some of his lost dignity, at least through completing the novel which he had postponed. So, the publication and success of his second full-length work of a comic fiction Vile Bodies on January 1930 gave him a strong push. Now, he became widely read and began to be more famous. His social life was more restrained than before.

Waugh resumed his travels, in early October 1930, starting with a visit to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) as a special correspondent of The Times to cover the celebration of the coronation of its ruler Negus Ras Tafari

34 who wanted to crown himself as Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia; in a hope that this experience would enhance his literary career and expand his vision. He arrived at Addis Ababa at the suitable time before the ceremonies of the coronation in November. He travelled many places in Ethiopia and from there to Djibouti, Aden, Harare, Sudan, Zanzibar, Kenya, Belgian Congo, and Cape Town. In early March of 1931, Waugh came back home loaded with very interesting experiences and good material he needed for his next works.

Thus, the result of his first experience of this journey was recorded in his next book, Remote People (1931). It is a sympathetic one, filled with boredom and disillusionment. It is relished in a tone of mockery to reflect the savage nature of the Africans and the gap between civilization and barbarism. In this book Waugh calls a series of seemingly absolute twofold oppositions between primitive Africans and civilized Europeans to confirm the distance between the European Catholicism and the magical Ethiopian Christianity. Through that Waugh tries to depict the religious practices of the Ethiopian Christians which are filled with an air of mystery that contrasts with the clarity of European Catholicism where their darkness is opposed to European light. For instance, Waugh harshly criticizes the African priests in Debra Lebanos which was considered the centre of the Abyssinian spiritual life. He says that they do not look like religious men; they do not go to Church, most of them carried rifles and swords, and all of them have mistresses and children. Wykes remarked that "Remote People was Waugh’s first book as a Catholic and he made clear in it that henceforth he would be a Catholic author…. The moment of revelation he gave himself at the monastery should have

35 left no one in doubt of the religious commitment of his work." (Wykes, 1999: 91).

The second result of this journey was the writing of his third satirical novel Black Mischief (1932). The novel is set in the fictional kingdom of Azania based on Waugh’s personal experiences in Abyssinia. It is a satirical comment on the West's naive attempts to civilize Africa as the country lurches from one upheaval to another. There is clear conflict between civilization and barbarism through creating wild and anarchic scenes. "Azania is a place where the savage and the civilized come into collision every day." (Littlewood, 1983: 47).

After a long conflict of unrestlessness in London, Waugh decided to another travel abroad. He decided to go to South America in the Winter of 1932 in search for an ideal home. His first destination was the Brazilian city Boa Vista. At the beginning of this visit he showed his admiration for the city, but sooner his vision changed after "He heard dismaying details from the few people he met who knew the place, but the vision persisted until at last he reached this run– down hopeless wreck of a place." (Sykes, 186) Hence, the unhappiness coloured the whole of his journey to South America where he spent 92 days in British Guiana. This experience produced a travel book called Ninety– Two days, in which Waugh portrayed his escape from Boa Vista. It is a fine and painful comedy, in addition to Waugh's masterpiece A Handful of Dust which was published in early September 1934. In this novel an honest man, Tony Last, has been drawn as a victim. Most critics observe that this novel marked a new development in Evelyn's writing, and it was considered his best book to date. On Ninety– Two Days critics observe that it is less important

36 travel book than Remote People; it is a book of memories rather than of strong narrative, though it contains some of Evelyn's best travel writing and description of scenery. About this book and Waugh’s journey Wykes remarks that:

It had been ‘a journey of the greatest misery’… The journey he had chosen to make would supply exactly the wrong kind of experience for his writing….And British Guiana had little in the way of culture or history. Interesting people were an absolute requisite, and on this trip he met mostly boring, ordinary, nice people, and found himself again and again in situations of frustration and tedium….In Ninety– Two Days Waugh took his sensibility on an exhausting and frustrating cross-country slog, and came close at times to making his reader wonder why he ever left home. (Wykes, 100)

On the other hand Patey states that: both Waugh’s trips to South America and the book (Ninety–Two Days) that emerged, proved a disappointment to the readers. Many readers of this book have described Waugh's trip as ‘penitential’ as if he were actually seeking to punish himself in the jungle. (Patey, 1998: 106). While in his Diaries Waugh mentions that "The journey to Brazil on which he embarked in the winter of 1932…contains a hint of penance." (Diaries 354).

On 7 August 1934, Waugh left to Ethiopia as the Daily Mail war correspondent to report the invasion of Italy to Abyssinia. On his way back to England, he visited Jerusalem, Baghdad; and before his coming back home in January 1936 he visited Rome where he met the Duce, Mussolini, giving him a very gloomy account of the difficulties facing his army in the battle field but at the same time Evelyn showed his admiration of the Duce who had a very impressive personality as

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Evelyn said (Stannard, 1988: 225–226). Concerning, the European presence in Africa, Waugh asserts that colonies appear in too many ways, under too many forms, for politicians and economists to generalize about them. Colonialism's supporters may often be cruel racialists among whom Anglo–Saxons are perhaps worse than any. However, Waugh sees the colonial project as inevitable and doomed, romantically appealing but a lost cause. Therefore, according to Waugh's point of view, the European powers are seen to be keen to exploit and are engaged in a network of codes and espionage.

However, the literary result of Waugh's second visit to Ethiopia was the publishing of another travel book Waugh in Abyssinia. In this book Waugh recounts his experiences as a war correspondent and impressions he got from his second journey to Abyssinia under the Italian occupation. In one of his letters from there he wrote to Katharine Asquith in August 1936 remarking that "I am sick of Abyssinia and my book about it. It was fun being pro-Italian when it was unpopular and (I thought) losing cause. I have sympathy with these exultant fascist now." (Letters, 126). Because of this, Rose Macaulay has called this book ‘a fascist tract’. But Littlewood argued that Waugh’s romanticism in this book "was not essentially political; it was, like his humour, an aspect of the refusal to accept a world that was grey while he still had the resources to make it vivid." (Littlewood, 1983: 84).

Directly, after the publication of Waugh in Abyssinia in 1936, Waugh began writing his fifth novel Scoop. It was published in May 1938. In this novel Waugh portrayed in a cold–blooded irony the mission of William Boot, a journalist who wrote the Lush Places column for the Daily Beast. Boot is sent by mistake to report a Civil

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War in the Negro State of Ishmaelia where Civil War is expected to break out. In spite of being the most popular of Waugh's novels by the sales figure but Waugh disliked this novel because the book took too much time to get completed. And also, "One of Waugh's more sensible critics suggests that the ‘shallow imaginative roots’ of this novel are owed to its ‘lack of strong autobiographical impulse’." (Wykes, 1999: 115). However, Scoop carries an ingenious plot and a cracking of jokes only a little less good than those of his first novel Decline and Fall. In this novel Waugh gives full rein to his fanciful humour. So he re–established himself as a popular humorist, satirizing the methods of modern sensational journalism, though some reviewers for Scoop stated that Waugh's job is to provide laughter, and he does it in a good way, but he is not a satirist. Stopp remarked that "Scoop depicts some of the more incredible activities of the international group of journalists planted for the war in Addis Ababa by their respective employers, set against an international backcloth of the rival ideologies of Communism and Fascism." (Stopp, 1958: 83).

In 1938, though Waugh was pessimistic about the future but he was full of hope and believed that the Church Militant might secure order. However, life in general was better for Waugh. He became well known in the literate circles as a considerable satirical comic novelist. He and Laura Herbert were married on 17 April 1937. In March 1938 Waugh and his wife visited Mexico on a request, to write a book on Mexico, from Clive Pearson who represented the Cowdray Estate which had massive financial interests in Mexican oil. At that time there was a crisis between the Mexican government and the oil companies working there. Among them was a British company, the Mexican Eagle which was prominent among the companies

39 expropriated. Waugh visited Mexico and after coming back he wrote Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object– Lesson; a short but dull book about Mexico. In this book he recounts his experience in Mexico describing the outrageous treatment of the Mexican Government towards the English oil company and portraying an impassionate history of the State's persecution of the Church. "He cannot forgive the Mexicans for having seized the oil industry, for having dispossessed the Church. His book, as he himself admits, is a collection of ‘notes on anarchy’." (Nicolson, 2002: 203).

1.10 Waugh's War Experience & Works

Waugh was too young to fight in the First World War, now in 1939 he was old enough to join the Second World War. But, despite he regarded the imminent conflict as an adventure, he was determined to prove himself and to feel the Test of Manhood in such an honourable service as most of English people believed. "With the same traditional enthusiasm, Waugh welcomed World War II as a heroic renaissance for himself and for England." (Darman,1978: 166). So he succeeded to be enlisted in the Royal Marines as an officer and commissioned immediately as a second–lieutenant, though he was physically unfit, inactive, overweight, out of condition and very short– sighted. Happily he celebrated his entry into the army. His friend Sykes remarked that "Evelyn's career as a solider… left him deeply disillusioned, a fact which tended to increase his disposition towards melancholy." (Sykes, 1985: 278). Waugh believed that his military service would offer him a new experience of war life about which he would be able to write. In fact he had got such experience but he was not a successful solider. He saw cowardice and the breakdown of order

40 everywhere. Such facts and atmosphere play a considerable role in Waugh's next literary life; Wykes observed that:

He did not know that his anarchic and in some ways defensive personality would make his military service an experience of frustration, bitterness, and disillusionment, and that it would push the changes he was effecting in his literary personality in unexpected and difficult directions. Waugh's experience of the Second World War was skewed from the start by his interpretation of the nature of the conflict. (Wykes, 1999: 124)

Wykes adds that "Wartime put Waugh into a mood of retrospection, sometimes rising or sinking to nostalgia that endured to the end of his career." (Wykes 133). While he was in the army, Waugh wrote a fragment novel called Work Suspended, which was published, incomplete, in a limited edition at the end of 1942. Waugh commented that it was his best writing up till then. It is a novel of two chapters. Chapter one describes how the protagonist, John Plant, a young man who wrote detective fiction; came back to England from Morocco after the death of his father. Chapter two describes how Plant fell in love with Lucy, the wife of his writer friend Roger Simmonds who was a professional humorist. This novel is written in different innovative style and different narrative method than Waugh's previous fiction. It is told in the first person narration by Plant.

In an article, on December 1946 in Horizon 371, Rose Macaulay remarked that "It [Work Suspended] is carefully composed; it lacks the earlier sparkle; it has a seriousness of tone…. The style is quiet and full. That it was not finished one feels a loss" (Macaulay, 2002: 232). While Stannard remarks that "Work Suspended is the most enigmatic of Waugh's writings." (Stannard, 1986: 490) In his next

41 novel Put Out More Flags (1942) Waugh portrays the world at war. It is a satirical novel describing the influence of war on society. It was written on board ship from 12 July to 3 September 1941 when Waugh's military unit was coming back from Africa. Marina Mackay remarked that "Put Out More Flags describes how creative dissidence is victimized by political expediency masquerading as patriotic duty." (Mackay, 2007: 121). This novel can be considered as Waugh's farewell to comic fiction. It also seems that Waugh had lost the ability to see people funny and instead he began to loathe and express real fear of the modern world and modern people which was going to constitute the main theme of his next writings. "He knew in 1939 that he was finished as solely the comic novelist, but he was not yet clear in his mind as to what he would fully become when he next returned to fiction." (Wykes, 1999: 119). Confirming this impression, George Dangerfield observed that:

Put Out More Flags comes less close to tragedy than do some of his earlier books, because the characters are no longer involved in a personal dilemma. The joke was always on them, but now they have no answer; and when they have no answer they cease to be persons. The world is at war in this novel, and-wriggle as they will—they can find no place for themselves in it. They are not persons any more, but just unhappy examples of a bad and silly society. They are out of date and therefore dead. (Dangerfield, 2002: 217)

Most of the critics agreed that Put Out More Flags can be considered as a literary turning point in Waugh's writings. In this novel there is clear change in the terms of the narrative technique. It is narrated through the use of omniscient narrator who knows everything and his voice is heard everywhere. In this novel one can feel that

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Waugh brought the world of his comic fiction to an end. It was successful and very well received. At this time Evelyn Waugh was in a strong position in the world of contemporary literature. He started to see the world with a different vision; a vision which reflects the new spirit of the new world, as full of fear and miseries, where Waugh has lost the ability to see people as funny. He wrote Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder; which was finished by June 1944 and published in May 1945.

Actually, It was another turning– point in Waugh's career. It is a novel with a religious theme; it deals with two interrelated things: the world and the spirit. In this novel, as most critics agree, Waugh completed the development in his novels from disorder to repentance. It is considered as a shift from the youthful recklessness to gravity, in which his own Catholicism came to the forefront. As a productive writer Waugh did not stop writing; he published his next book Scott– King's Modern Europe, in 1947, it is slim, almost not more than a short story about a harmless schoolmaster caught in the hardship and restrictions of the modern world. Through it Waugh portrays an imaginary image of dictator state of Neutralia. Though a lot of comic situations permeate this story but it is described by Stopp as "a sad little story" (Stopp, 1958: 136).

Due to some sharp critical reviews accusing Waugh of being ill- humored in writing such a weak story, he showed his anger in a letter to his close friend Nancy Mitford by ironically criticizing them saying that "All the reviews of Scott-King, instead of being about the book, have been about me saying that I am ill-tempered and self- infatuated…. All my most valued books have been eaten by tiny spiders." (Letters 303). While Wykes remarks: "In Scott-King’s

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Modern Europe (1949), the protagonist expresses Waugh's view that the war had ‘cast its heroic and chivalrous disguise and become a sweaty tug- of- war between teams of indistinguishable louts’" (Wykes, 1999: 124).

Then, Waugh wrote The Loved One, in 1948, after his visit to America in 1947. During this visit Waugh was fascinated by the fabulous cemetery in Whispering Glades, as he was to rename it Forest Lawn, in Southern California. He was fascinated by the ritual for disguising death which is big business there. In this novel, Waugh depicts the city and the cemetery with irony as a kind of leisure resort where "The images of Art and Death and Love are to be located in the Eden of Whispering Glades in a state of sterility and up rootedness." (Bradbury, 1973: 177). Ironically, Waugh tries to show how the people of the twentieth century pay much attention to glorify the dead, decayed physical body while they neglect the immortal soul. About it Waugh said that "The Loved One is being well received in intellectual circles. They think my heart is in the right place after all. I’ll show them." (Letters 313). In his study Ironic Vision of Modern Life in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One Harbir Singh Randhawa argued that:

His novel The Loved One throws light upon the modern life. Though on first reading the novel could easily be divided into two parts- the satirical treatment of America’s communalized burial system by Waugh and secondly the shattered hopes of British expatriates who came to Hollywood with their American dream and later found themselves bewildered with the changing circumstances. But in its depth the novel deals with the decaying modern world where the survivors are the emotionally deprived people like Dennis and Mr. Joyboy and the idealistic

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people like Sir Francis and Aimee who had no other option but to commit suicide. (Randhawa, 2007: 241-2)

In this novel Waugh strongly criticizes the way of modern people dealing with their dead through the mortuary business, when people fail to love, respect and reward a person while he is alive but after his death, they spend thousands on his mummifying just to make him presentable for maintaining their status in the society, which is exactly what is happening nowadays in our age. Not only people, but government also rewards the distinguished people only after their death; whoever they are: writers, artists, athletes…etc. especially sometimes things become more difficult, a lot of them become poor, old, physically weak and sick at the end of their lives and they do not have the cost of their medicine. However, through such behaviour of rewarding the dead body of their beloved; they are rewarding death itself but not their beloved due to the fear from it because they become hypocrite, faithless and faraway from God. McCartney reflects the core of Waugh’s philosophy by saying "Below, the fake warmth of pseudo-traditional architecture and decoration, aged wood and soft carpeting; above, the chrome-cold intelligence that has contrived this travesty of funeral customs to profit from the public’s exorbitant fear of death." (McCartney, 1987: 65).

In March 1950 Waugh finished Helena on which he had spent longer time than on any other novel. In one of his letters to Nancy Mitford after coming back from a visit to America Waugh wrote "Home, now, thank God, and at work again on Helena which is to be my MASTERPIECE. [and ironically said that] No one will like it at all." (Letters 357). It is deceptively simple. In this novel Waugh portrays the world as his own which opens as timeless, historical and like a fairy tale. Waugh depicts the same conflicts which arise in the

45 main body of his contemporary fiction. It reflects Waugh’s disillusionment, in which the atmosphere is one of darkness, confusion, arbitrary violence produced by a progressive culture. Through Helena, Waugh tries to return to a dream of a historical fiction in which artistic and social values could be maintained only by an effort of the imagination. Rome is disordered with apartment houses peopled by an ambitious, materialist middle class; the artists have lost the skills of representation and are sliding into a chaos of pure abstraction. Murder is commonplace and spiritual values are neglected; marriage and divorce have become a solely material concern. The journey, Helena makes, from the interior to the coast, is like the one Waugh made as a soldier carrying his burden of guilt away from the massacres of war. Praising Waugh's style of writing this novel, Sykes says that "I find Helena a very difficult book to judge. All Evelyn's merits are present in it, his wit, his broad humour, his irony; in addition it contains some of the best pieces of evocative writing that he achieved at any time" (Sykes, 1985: 428).

In 1953, Waugh published Love Among the Ruins. It is a fantasy novella of the future, with a hero called Miles Plastic who fell in love with a lady of ‘a long, silken, corn-gold beard’ living in the glorification of the nanny state where people are fed with lies. It is a short nightmare on the issue of the idealistic social state which offers free euthanasia for its citizens and the abnormal behaviour of modern man. In his last two years, Waugh published A Little Leaning: The First Volume of an Autobiography in 1964, and later in 1965 he revised the three novels of his war trilogy to be published in one single volume entitled Sword of Honour. Shortly, in the trilogy Waugh examined the individual of the Second World War, his relationship

46 with the eternal struggle between good and evil in particular, and the earthly struggle between civilization and barbarism in general. "With the completion of trilogy Evelyn's career as a serious writer of fiction drew to an end." (Sykes, 1985: 569). In April 1966 Waugh died suddenly at his home.

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Chapter Two

Literature Review and Theoretical Frame Work

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Chapter Two Literature Review and Theoretical Framework

2.0 Modern Literature and Modernism

Actually, modern English Literature can be considered to fall into four phases; the first one is from the beginning of the First World War 1914 to 1923. One of the most distinguished trends of this period was the desire of writers to go back to the old; the fabric of intellectual life of London appeared to have deteriorated. The modern England was no longer a place for civilized men and women; it was divided between a fading vision of classical order and the lively nihilism which widely invaded and darkened the modern world. Such a period was against the classical standards with which that the artists measured the world. The spirit of the old London collapsed, in some way, vanished from being a heart of the world, and became wandering in a broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears and horrors. The artists started to feel as if they were strangers in their country. Therefore, in this period, a lot of literary works which revealed a nostalgia to the old past days were appeared where there was clear dissatisfaction with the present. It was also a retreat from the industrialization and the city into natural, authentic and rural past. In his Modern Nostalgia Robert Hemmings comments:

David Lowenthal identifies nostalgia’s appeal as the celebration of ‘an ordered clarity contrasting with the chaos or imprecision of our own times’. [But] Other recent critics demonstrate that for nostalgia to take root, certain socio- historical conditions must prevail. Societies must be governed by a linear, not a cyclical conception of time, without the redemptive imperative of the future salvation of

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afterlife. That is, they must be secular. (Hemmings, 2008: 3-4)

The second period between 1923 and 1929 can be called "The Jazz Age". Though it particularly took place in the United States but Britain, France and other European countries were also a part of it. Martin Stannard remarked that Oxford in 1924-5 "was changing beyond recognition….The Jazz Age had arrived and….Under graduate motored noisily from College to College for drinking parties and roared down to London at eighty miles an hour" (Stannard,1986: 103). This period played an important role in the social and cultural changes. It is usually connected with the phenomenon of breaking traditions, like sexual transgression, change in gender roles, misuse of alcohol and drugs. Most of these things had been practiced by Evelyn Waugh and his friends through the period of their study in Oxford.

Consequently, there was a disposition to get rid of, deny, and mock the older morality and faith which was totally anti-Victorianism. About these great changes which affected all the aspects of life in general and literature in particular, David Ayers remarks that:

Sex and sexuality do not only have a crucial structural role in the literature dealing with war and social change, they also generate a whole literature of their own in the 1920s which is variously cynical and progressive. The treatment of sex reflects both social realities and a renewed intellectual interest in sex, and plays a key part in the notion of this decade as ‘jazz age’…young women were connected not merely with Bolshevism but with sexuality itself. They seemed to undermine traditional gender roles at the level of appearance and behavior, sporting short haircuts such as the famous bobo and wearing shorter skirts which showed an amount of leg considered indecent before

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the war. Many young women took to smoking in public, another sign of modernity and independence, and began to mix with men on a much more informal basis (Ayers, 2004: 136).

The third period starts from 1929 to 1939, which can be called the years of despair, pessimism and the great depression. The fourth is the postmodern period; it is the period of the Second World War and its continuing aftermath, The Cold War from 1945 to the present time. The period which witnessed the end of modernism, Michael H. Whitworth observes that "A large number of critics…including Graham Hough, Robert Graves, and Karl Shapiro, identified 1957 as the year in which modernism died" (Whitworth, 2007: 273). Henceforth, the developments and problems of modern society like The Industrial Revolution, The appearance of Marxism, The Aesthetic Movements, The spread of Colonialism, The Rise of Mass Culture, The decline of religious faith and the human values, health, education, poverty, all these, need to be represented and reflected; therefore modernist literature, and modernist art in general, often takes Man as a point of reference to display an awareness of the complexity of the mind and the identity, it is considered to be one of the best tools that reflects and focuses on such problems and developments

Though many critics believed that the terms modernism and modernists appeared to be in use since 1908 onwards, Whitworth argued that they did not refer to themselves as modernists nor to their movement as modernism; they "defined themselves by creating distinctive groups and by contrasting their practices with those of a previous generation…they emphasized the technical innovations necessary to realize their vision of modernity" (Whitworth, 2007: 39). Gary Day also remarks that:

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Modernist literature is an attempt to find new forms of representation for a new kind of society, one that seems to be constantly changing. It uses a variety of techniques to do that, from myth to stream of consciousness. But modernist literature is not just an attempt to find a more accurate form of representation, one that is true to individual experience, it also aims to diagnose the ills of modern society and to suggest a cure. (Day,2010: 7)

Writers like Ford Madox Ford, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh gained an early reputation for directly translating, satirizing and ironically underscoring the chaos, complexity and the unstable conditions of modern life reflecting the fast social changes which appeared in the wake of the deadly historical events of the two World Wars and gave modern life its new shape. It is as Georg Simmel observes that:

The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage, and the external culture and technique of life. This antagonism represents the most modern form of the conflict…man must carry on with nature for his own bodily existence. (Simmel, 2008: 12)

Waugh was influenced by some writers among them was Harold Acton (1904-1994) who became close, lifelong friend and mentor of Waugh. He founded a new undergraduate magazine called The Oxford Broom. This magazine played an important part in young Evelyn's life. "Waugh used his influence in Oxford journalism to provide an easy

52 market for his own contributions to Acton's campaign–short stories and, much more important, drawings." (Stannard, 1986: 87).

While discussing the context of Waugh's early novels, and what Waugh adopted or took from the work of his predecessors, Davis states that there are a lot of similarities among the works of the 1920s, like, Carl Van Vechten, The Blind Bow– Boy: A Cartoon for a Stained Glass Window (1923), Aldous Huxley: Antic Hay (1923), Michael Arlen: The Green Hat (1924), Van Vechten: Firecrackers (1925), Earnest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises(1926), Beverly Nichols: Crazy Pavements (1927), Vechten: Spider Boy (1928), Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall (1928), Waugh: Vile Bodies (1930), and, Vechten: Parties (1930). And the fact is that Evelyn Waugh not only knew these novels but, he also had literally clear ideas about their methods, and the strong sense of particular patterns in character and form. Davis argues that:

All of these novels are set in London or Paris or New York; all present highly sophisticated characters whose major occupation is amusing themselves; all not only reflect disillusion with conventional morals but indicate that new styles of behaviour are not entirely satisfactory. All demonstrate an overt awareness not only of new modes of behaving but of new forms in which to describe them. All of them describe worlds in which, to use Dr. Fagan's words, “taste and dignity…go unhampered”.… All consciously embody a new approach to fiction as well as to life. (Davis, 31– 32)

Waugh was also influenced by some of his predecessors of the English novel, such as Ronald Firbank, Hilair Belloc, Harold Bloom, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Edward Gibbon. He considered Gibbon's greatest value as a model historian, a model adoptable by a

53 novelist. Waugh also appreciated Gibbon's position against the Church when he blamed Christianity for the decline and fall. His friend Sykes remarks that "Evelyn was always prepared to learn from other people, unlike conceited writers of less assured talent, I never knew him to show envy of other writers' achievements or success." (Sykes, 1985: 422). To reflect the confusion of his age Waugh found in Firbank's objectivity the suitable way to do that. Such style gave him the ability "to avoid both the restrictive conventions of realism and the psychoanalytic excesses of modernism." (McCartney, 1987: 71). This method of writing enabled Waugh to reflect the contemporary lack of certainty without cramping him in the traps of subjectivity.

2.1 The Previous Studies about the Topic

In his study of Waugh's personality and life, Stannard concludes that: "There was a streak of mild sadism in him. But it was only mild. He enjoyed the struggle, the competition of life, and was intolerant of those who backed away from it…he was gifted with a sensitive, contemplative intelligence, and was acutely self– critical" (Stannard, 1986: 166). While Berberich remarked that what Waugh saw in others behaviour he did not see it in his. "Waugh was consequently a double standard: he expected and encouraged perfect behaviour in others; but displayed an altogether different one himself." (Berberich, 2007: 133). In such an atmosphere, all the powers that would reduce the individual to nothingness were transformed into a source of pleasure by making different jokes out of chaos, loneliness, powerlessness, stupidity, authority, nihilism, pain and death; as with Clara, the heroine of Waugh's novella Love Among the Ruins, where the central joke is that Clara has ‘a long, silken, corn– gold beard.’ Due to the drastic changes

54 in the system of life of his age, Waugh was under great depression and disappointed. He felt alienated and he wanted to be gone; to anywhere, from his home in Piers Court, from England or even from life to death. Therefore, under such critical moments, he believed that he had to be careful enough because if he continued to get enjoyment from hurting others through satirizing them, so, no one would love him; but, the biggest problem he felt, if he could not feel sorry for his lack of compassion, even God could not love him which was very painful.

Consequently, Stannard argued that Waugh could not stop himself from hurting others. "Evelyn Waugh was a tormented man. He hurt people and somehow could not stop himself from doing it.…‘I am a bigot and a philistine’, he wrote to Lord David Cecil." (Stannard,1994: 247). Sykes commented that "Certainly Evelyn had hurt more people than he should have done, but this belated revenge did not credit to the injured" (Sykes, 1985): 594). While McCartney remarks that it must first be said that Waugh's:

…satiric objective was not moral but metaphysical and it is on this ground his work achieves consistency of purpose….He fully expected people would behave badly with or without moral standards and had no hesitation in admitting his feelings. In his view, the real issue was the general disillusionment with the notion of the absolutes, whether moral or metaphysical. (McCartney, 2004: 2)

In fact, Waugh sees the contemporary world as futile and anarchic; a world without principles. Therefore the absence of authentic conservers provokes him to express his own philosophy that "man is, by nature, an exile and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth" (Sykes, 1985: 256). Justifying Waugh's disillusionment, Bradbury remarks that:

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…his view [Waugh] that man is by nature an exile, that his chances of improving his condition are small, that there is no form of government ordained by God as being better than any other, that men naturally arrange themselves into system of classes, that government is necessary because of the anarchic impulse in mankind, and that Art is a natural function of man which can exist in any social system….his historical picture seems , in fact, to be founded on the view that, by schism and political activity, European Catholic civilization went into decline which has gradually brought about a lapse into anarchy, paganism and meaningless action. (Bradbury, 1964: 12)

Although, Waugh admired and was fascinated by old and past morals but he believed that man is inherently corrupt and wicked therefore there had never been a period of relatively moral behaviour. Reflecting this philosophy Wykes observed accurately that "The eternal war of civilization against the chaos and anarchy that originate in man’s originally corrupt nature is the foundation theme of all of Waugh’s fiction." (Wykes, 1999: 80). For that reason, though his adherence to traditionalism he is not considered as a traditional satirist, in the sense that traditional satire seeks to correct morals and manners in a stable society. Accordingly Waugh himself denied in one of his articles in 1946 that he was writing satire at all; he argued that:

Satire is a matter of period. It flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogenous moral standards - the early Roman Empire and 18th Century Europe. It is aimed at inconsistency and hypocrisy. It exposes polite cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue. The artist's only service to the disintegrated society of today is to create

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little independent systems of order of his own. (Gallagher, 1984: 251)

One can find Waugh's literary energy sprang from anger, in the sense that when he had something to complain about, he could only write amusingly to extend the range of his enemies. He taught his children never to be humble, always to attack, always to scorn with wit and to be funny. He had an extraordinary power to make people pleasing him. What makes many critics praise Waugh's style of writing is its economy, or in other words ‘not a word is wasted’ in his writing. "Waugh was greatly concerned with language…. He wrote with purity because he owed it to himself and to God to do his best at what he did best." (Lebedoff, 2008: 205–6). In fact, Waugh himself made a grand announcement of his love for the English language when style has become a main concern and writing a pleasure; saying that "it is the most lavish and delicate which mankind has ever known….I have never, until quite lately, enjoyed writing"(Wykes, 1999: 205).

Critics also stressed that, in all Waugh's writing, especially at the time of his later works, he was infatuated by craftsmanship and by the relationship between language and class. He had been fascinated by any complex; like the internally coherent social system with its own language and the correct and expected way to behave. He believed that a good novel should reflect this; that is why he admired Hemingway's style for instance and adopted Dickens' style in writing autobiographical fiction. Though Waugh believed in the idealism of Art-for-Art's-sake, but he refused to separate it from the artist's responsibility to communicate, preserve and enrich tradition. Waugh said of his work: "I regard writing not as investigation of character but an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical and psychological interest. It is drama, speech and events

57 that interest me." (Quoted by Penguin Books in the introduction of Waugh's Decline and Fall, 2003). About Waugh's artistic abilities Wykes observed that:

He [Waugh] possessed the comic intelligence that has persisted in the English novel, through Fielding and Jane Austen and Dickens, into the twentieth century and into the six comic novels that came before Brideshead Revisited in 1945. Waugh's comic intelligence matches Jane Austen's and his exuberance in those six books is Dickensian. No account, biographical or otherwise, can explain how he came by this power… for it is the comedy of Waugh's earlier novels that supports the entirety of his reputation and gives him his permanent place in the history of the English novel. (Wykes,1999: 1)

Through close focus on Waugh's late life one can find that Waugh lived with guilt and sadness, in spite of the happy life he tried to show and to amuse the people around him. It was resentment about the devaluation of modern life, the fading of serious and devoted faith, and the loss of the hierarchy and order which maintained civilization. In his second book, the later years of Waugh's life, Stannard noted that:

Beneath all this, deeply buried, there lay that seed of guilt: guilt at his failure to do more in Yugoslavia; guilt at his lack of affection for his children; guilt at his instinctive cruelty; above all, guilt at not feeling guilty. There was a religious dryness in his soul which hurt him, a lack of contrition, and he found it difficult to pray. His faith remained one of intellectual conviction rather than of emotional release. (Stannard, 1994: 157)

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Like most of the critics, Bradbury asserts that Waugh is "a totally modern novelist, offering his own values with assertive prejudice, but in a world where the really truthful statement is that of the flux and anarchy." (Carens, 1966: xvi). On this account, and as a result of the futile and absurd life of the period, after the Great War, the decline of moral values, the loss of faith and identity, the boredom of life, the sterility of the social relations and the disintegration of the English family, Waugh directs his sharp satire against these modern phenomena. "Modern times pressed hard on Waugh in his last decades. The decline of the aristocracy, the encroachment of American power, and, above all, the ascendance of the liberal movement in the Catholic Church appalled and depressed him." (Darman, 1978: 162- 67). In another article Bradbury adds that:

Waugh is very much a novelist of the disillusioned Twenties, in that he shares the prevailing obsession of the decade with barbarism and vitalism as the alternative to rational civilization; it is an essential part of his comic thrust and subject-matter….Like other writers who began in the 1920s-Aldous Huxley and…Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Nathanael West – he is obsessed with the world of an irrevocable modernity, a world of psychological stress, dissolving relationships, new lifestyles, novel technologies and environments; his creative energy takes him readily into encounters with such people and milieux, with a curiosity divorced from moral judgment and fascinated by extravagant behavior. (Bradbury, 1973: 171-2)

Waugh tried to convey a sense of modern disorder and explain its causes. He believed that modernity became the main danger to individuality which cannot be apart from the roots of traditional

59 morality and religious conventions. Without such roots, no real personality can flourish. Confirming these ideas, McCartney says that:

In novel after novel, Waugh portrayed the consequences of jettisoning the traditions that had created the society and culture of Western Europe since the collapse of the Roman Empire...he was convinced the core of the older order's sensibility would be retained. He believed it would become the cornerstone for whatever new edifice was being built by an increasingly technological society. While he could never be fully in sympathy with such a world, as a matter of faith he concluded it would have to build on the Greek, Hebrew, and Christian past. (McCartney, 2004: x)

As a result readers cannot feel sympathy with most of Waugh's characters; "Waugh, no less than Greene…he views his characters with the eye of the naturalist. They are animals, savage, unscrupulous, selfish… and weak. There are those who prey and those who are preyed upon. For both writers life is a jungle." (Boyle, 2011: 76). With the same notion, Davis argues that:

One of the traits of Waugh's character obvious to him as well as to everyone who ever knew him or read his work was the inability to sympathize with or even to attempt to understand those who did not share his tastes…. Even when he liked people, he could keep them at the point of his barbed style and regard them as specimen. (Davis, 1989: 53)

With this sense Wykes debates that "The human behaviour that Waugh depicted in his books is that of exiles, outcasts, people with no valid landmarks or guideposts." (Wykes, 1999: 2). Because of that, one may notice that, in most of his fictions, Waugh showed how he hates and fears the Age of the Common Man, the lower– middle– class

60 man, who is the inheritor of the future. Such philosophy concurred with the American Vice–president's declaration about the Age of the Common Man, not long before Evelyn began to write the novel Brideshead Revisited in February 1944 the Vice-president of the United States, Henry Wallace, had declared that "the century on which we are entering…can and must be the century of the common man." (Patey, 1998: 205). But the fact is that Waugh continued insisting that "The Common Man does not exist. He is an abstraction invented by bores for bores." (Gallagher,1984: 302). Waugh has also confirmed his opinion with the interviewers of a programme called ‘Frankly Speaking’ in the BBC in 1953, who were gravely horned; when they asked Evelyn Waugh:

‘You have not much sympathy with the man in the street, have you, Mr Waugh?’ [Waugh answered that]… ‘you must understand’… ‘that the man in the street does not exist. He is a modern myth. There are individual men and women, each one of whom has an individual and immortal soul, and such beings need to sue streets time to time.’ (Sykes, 1985: 477)

2.2 The Theoretical Study

Waugh performs comparable anti-humanist criticism of secular societies in his novels. Furthermore, it can be suggested that Waugh's respective examination of modern society, both in England and abroad, is informed by his Catholic belief. Humanism was problematic for Waugh because he did not agree that fallible man – morally weak and liable to sin – should be placed as the highest being in the universe; nor did he accept that society would progress increasingly over time, as he argued that boundaries and structure were needed in

61 order to limit man's inherent failings. Waugh proposed that men and society in general should live in relation to God's laws. In his fictions of the early to mid-thirties, he can be viewed as disapproving of humanist system of living when he portrays various political and secular lifestyles as destructive and entrapping. Therefore, Waugh's anti-humanist condemnation of secular society conform with contemporary religious views on the subject. The non-fictional work produced by Waugh in the years immediately after his conversion set out his view that worldly societies need to follow the religious (Catholic) values in order to prevent the collapse of civilization as a whole.

What attracted Waugh to Catholicism was his strong belief that without Christianity people cannot maintain human civilization; and to do so, people have to choose completely organized system of Christian philosophy which they can find only in Catholicism. In an article, written in 1930, Waugh explained his dissatisfaction with the Protestants’ attitude of going to the Church which hastened his conversion to Catholicism; he commented once that the "Protestant attitude seems often to be, ‘I am good; therefore I go to church’, while the ‘Catholic’s is, ‘I am very far from God; therefore I go to church" (Gallagher, 1984: 367).

Within this context, Alexander Boyle asserts that Waugh’s Catholic beliefs affected not only his personal life but his fiction as well. "Waugh has a Catholic view of life, and this has influenced his novels more than anything else." (Boyle, 2011: 78). Waugh also believed that the craftsmanship of the artist and the priest engaged with a similar task. Another reason which motivated Waugh to escape from Protestant to Catholicism was his disdain for the Church of

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England; as what Davis argued that Waugh's scorn for the Church of England was characterized by:

Sterility and inefficacy… in the moral order caused not only by “lack of vital contact with the Mystical Body of the True Church” but also by “the social injustice and the class oppression on which it is based: for, since it is mostly a class religion, it contracts the guilt of the class from which it is inseparable. (Davis, 1989: 96)

Thus, religion to Waugh was more important than social climbing which he was in love. In one of his essays Waugh wrote "Man without God is less than Man." (Patey, 1998: 54). Consequently Wykes remarks "He [Waugh] believed that God had assigned a task to every human soul, and that to live in harmony with God’s will meant identifying correctly the task assigned and doing it to the best of one’s ability." (Wykes,1999: 76). Concerning this point of view Lebedoff observed:

Waugh believed that life without a moral code was chaos, that Christianity provided the moral code on which Western civilization rested, and that Catholicism was the purest form of Christianity. His faith was indeed a rational, not an emotional, choice, and it brought order and purpose to his life. (Lebedoff,2008: 69)

About the processes of change of Waugh's faith, Father Martin D'Arcy remarked in an article, The Religion of Evelyn Waugh, that "The first ten years of his life proved to him that life in England or anywhere else was ‘unintelligible and unendurable without God’. Once he had arrived to this conclusion, he turned inevitably to the Catholic Church." (D'Arcy, 63). D'Arcy adds that "The steps which brought him [Waugh] to his embracing the Catholic faith are visible in

63 the themes of his novels." (62) In the following words Waugh explained his feelings and his religious attitude toward Christianity when he first met Father D'Arcy:

As I said when we first met, I realize that the Roman Catholic Church is the only genuine form of Christianity. Also that Christianity is the essential and formative constituent of western culture. In our conversation and in what I have read or heard since, I have been able to understand a great deal of the dogma and discipline which seemed odd to me before. But the trouble is that I don't feel Christian in the absolute sense. The question seems to be must I wait until I do feel this– which I suppose is a gift from God which no amount of instruction can give one, or can I become a Catholic when I am in such an incomplete state– and so get the benefit of the sacraments and receive faith afterward? (Quoted in Patey, 41)

This conversion caused a kind of self-isolation for Waugh from a lot of his acquaintances due to the Protestants’ domination in the country at that time, but actually it is not clear whether Waugh isolated himself because of his dissatisfaction with the Protestants or they moved away from him. In an article Evelyn Waugh: Sanity and Catholicism (Autumn, 1962) Patricia Corr observed that:

In a country predominantly Protestant or Agnostic, the Catholic convert isolates himself from his fellows. This theme of isolation runs through the Catholic novels of Mr Waugh quietly expressed in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold but much more heavily underlined in the larger canvasses of Brideshead Revisited, and the war novels. Catholicism replaces the more generally defined personal integrity of the hero as the isolating factor in these later novels. Mr Waugh is not only separated from his non-Catholic friends,

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he is equally distant from the Catholic members of society. (Corr, 1962: 394)

Having confronted some misconceptions about religious conversion and having established his religious (Catholic) perspective, Waugh outlined his argument regarding the nature and the future of European civilization. According to him, the problems afflicting the modern world were complexly linked to religious issues: "in the present phase of European history the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on one side, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity And chaos" (EAR 103). By contrasting religion with chaos, Waugh confirmed his belief that Christianity represented order, stability, and permanence, which he arguably alluded to in his earlier satires.

Regarding the relationship between civilization and religion, Waugh also confirmed that civilization "came into being through Christianity", and that, without religion, civilization "has not in itself the power of survival" (EAR 104). T. S. Eliot articulated a similar argument in 'The Humanism of Irving Babbitt' (1928) when he stated: "If you mean a spiritual and intellectual coordination on a high level, then it is doubtful whether civilization can endure without religion, and religion without a church" (Eliot, 1951: 471-80,479). Whereas Eliot wrote from an Anglo-Catholic standpoint, Waugh asserted that "Christianity exists in its most complete and vital form" (EAR 104) in Roman Catholicism, and he mentioned that the religion should be the fundamental component of civilization.

Following this belief, Waugh argued that the widespread loss of faith was responsible for the weak state of European civilization at the beginning of the nineteen thirties, which was why it was "in greater

65 need of combative strength than it had been for centuries" (EAR 104). He presented Roman Catholicism as the most suitable form of faith through which to strengthen civilization, because the teaching was "coherent and consistent" and the faith was supported by "competent organization and discipline" (EAR 104).

David Wykes puts this view well: "The eternal war of civilization against the chaos that originate in man's originally corrupt nature is the foundation theme of all of Waugh's fiction"(Wykes, 1999: 80). Waugh maintained that the inherent sinfulness and weakness of man could only be addressed by embracing the discipline of the religion. In Waugh's opinion, surrendering to the humanist view of finding "good in everything" merely led to "an inability to distinguish between good and bad", and consequently forced one to "put up with what is wasteful and harmful" (EAR 128). Waugh's belief in Original Sin, in addition to his related conviction that religious boundaries are needed in secular societies, forms the foundation of his political thinking in the early thirties, which became increasingly right-wing over time.

Consequently, as he paid much attention to moral and human behaviour and beliefs; Waugh believed, especially in the last two decades of his life, that a complete and successful life can only be lived when the fact of Death is kept firmly in mind. He believed that Man should always consider Death as a welcome friend at any time. "In the greatest and smallest human affairs remember that Death is at the elbow." (Stannard, 1994: 182). Waugh's friend Frances Donaldson also mentioned that:

Evelyn suffered from a melancholia of Johnsonian proportions, and he found life so terrible boring he could

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hardly endure from day to day; he was often ill, seldom completely well; he was the only person I have ever known who seemed sincerely to long for death; he was terrifying to a stranger, merciless to a friend; but it is true that his house and life revolved round jokes, very, very funny jokes. (Donaldson, 1968: xiii– xiv)

Waugh's last years were not happy. He wished and prayed for death. He believed that ‘all fates are worse than death.’ He completely believed that Man is created to worship and be happy with the love of God, a love which he expresses in service. Therefore, if Man consciously turns away from that enjoyment, he is denying the purpose of his existence. Due to Waugh's fear and depression Wykes argues:

It is evident that he had suffered for years from depression, a disease that is made worse by alcohol and that seems to find an unusual proportion of its victims among writers. And his depression could only have been deepened by his refusal to attribute it to any but spiritual causes. In the mid- 1960s, Church matters and their implications for his own spiritual condition hugely compound his depression. (Wykes,1999: 210)

Waugh recognized that the burden and responsibility to successfully reconstruct society, and to 'get adulthood right', was placed upon his generation. In 'Why Glorify Youth?' (1932), Waugh recalled the pressure he felt at school: "I hardly remember a single speech or sermon made to us at school which did not touch on this topic. You are the men of tomorrow, they used to say to us. You are succeeding to the leadership of a broken and shaken world. The cure is in your hands, etc., etc." (EAR 126). Waugh explained that his generation's response to these 'glowing expectations' came in the form

67 of its subversive and hedonistic behaviour: The period which in no doubt presently be known as "roaring twenties" (EAR 126). Instead of facing their social responsibilities, the Bright Young People withdrew into a constant round of party-going. Waugh rejected the modern world around him and saw it as a wasteland, but his humoristic gift helped him to reform the wilderness into a circus. He depicted all the people of the modern age as sterile, paralyzed, outcast, and uprooted.

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Chapter Three

The Author's Views of Modern Life &

A Brief Summary of the Novels under Study

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Chapter Three

The Author's Views of Modern Life & A Brief Summary of the Novels under Study

3.0 Evelyn Waugh's Views of Modern Life

Actually, There is a great difference between the nineteenth century writers and the twentieth century ones. The nineteenth century writers like William Morris, Alfred Tennyson, and Edward Bellamy imagined that the future would be better than the present due to the sense of confidence, innocence, faithfulness, simplicity, and stability of their old society whereas none of the twentieth century writers imagines a better future as Evelyn Waugh predicts that the modern life will be absurd, meaningless, and inhuman due to the changes in beliefs and political conceptions that are influenced by the events of the First and the Second World Wars.

Waugh has got a commanding position among writers whether in England or in America where people started to reevaluate the previous judgement against him as an unimportant novelist with distinct satiric predispositions. Thus, by the mid half of the last century, Waugh’s name began to reappear widely and appealed to by different scholars and critics like Martin Stannard, Frederic J. Stopp, George McCartney, John Kenneth Galbraith, William F. Buckley, Gore Vidal, and Barbara Bush, Robert Murray Davis, Frank Kermode and others. Hence, as religion was the centre of Evelyn's life, he made no secret of his disdain for the reform-movement in the Catholic Church in the post-war years. In fact, Waugh believed that through its long history the Church had developed a ritual which enabled an

70 ordinary sensual man to approach God and be aware of sanctity and divinity.

The modern people presented by Waugh are physically alive but spiritually dead. They are unable to love; they are failures in relationships concerning love and marriage; they are sterile; they are unproductive humans; they are unable to take any firm action to improve their social conditions because they have lost faith in themselves and their religion; they became unfaithful; they are the slaves of their personal lusts. Such thoughts confirmed that Waugh is strongly influenced by T. S. Eliot's philosophy about modern Man. In the same way Leonard Ungbr has remarked that:

This theme of the failure of communication, of a positive relationship, between a man and a woman is found again in the other early poems ‘Hysteria’ and ‘La Figlia che Piange’, and it is indeed a major theme of the whole body of Eliot's work. It appears early in The Waste Land with the image of the ‘hyacinth girl. (Ungbr, 10).

While John Xiros Cooper remarked that "Eliot was no transcendentalist mystic. He was certainly a Christian believer but he understood, as did his Roman Catholic contemporaries Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, the necessity of recognizing the human state in all its fallen and tragic forms as still penetrated, in those very forms, by divine grace." (Cooper, 2006: 84). With this notion, Patey observes that:

All Waugh's fiction of the thirties explores the implications of modernism– his sense, as he put it in 1931, that ‘the enlightened people of Northern Europe’, ‘having lost their belief in revealed religion’, are now ‘falling back helplessly

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for moral guidance on their own tenderer feelings’. (Patey, 55)

Waugh is watching the continuous deterioration of what he believed to be a great society. He portrays such a society falling in danger on all sides by people who live without a sense of belonging. He considers the age in which he is living, declining and falling. That is why in most of his works Waugh presents a world without safety, in which the history of human foolishness has destroyed the possibility of earthly shelter. For Waugh, the complete freedom and liberty is very dangerous to any society. In spite of Waugh's early rash personal life, he does not believe in unlimited freedom. Waugh believes that such freedom produces sterility because the individual doesn’t use his mind to lead him to a disciplined life. Man is going to let his anarchic behaviour talk instead of himself. Consequently one of the good effects of discipline is to provoke a healthy resistance against such a reckless behaviour. Waugh wants to reconfirm that "without the shaping discipline of traditions and religious values the individual is left at every moment to reinvent himself, with no guide but his own wayward appetites; but you can’t have growth if you do what you like as we ordinarily mean it." (Patey, 1998: 56).

Patey also wrote that, "The trouble about the world today is that there's not enough religion in it. There's nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment."(Patey 32). This speech reflects that Waugh’s philosophy about religion is the same as that of T.S. Eliot’s, as John Xiros Cooper remarks:

For him [Eliot], religion was the key, not simply as a form of cultural expression but rather as a supernatural power finding expression, not as culture, but as something spiritually immanent in the worldly state. Religion grounds

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the values that Eliot endorsed, not religion as transcendence, but religion as woven into concrete existence via institutions, historical practices, sacred texts, and those specially trained in the maintenance of the faith. (Cooper, 2006: 31)

3.1 A Brief Summary of the Novels under Study 3.1.1 Decline and Fall (1928) Evelyn Waugh wrote Decline and Fall during a period in which the traumas of the First World War were resurrected in the publication of memoirs, collections of poetry, novels, and plays. These publications include Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) by Siegfried Sassoon, Goodbye to All That (1929) by Robert Graves, and Death of a Hero (1929) by Richard Aldington. Whereas these texts deal explicitly with the horrors and implications of the First World War, Waugh's early novels register the conflict in more subtle ways, through oblique references to its legacy.

Decline and Fall depicts the story of Paul Pennyfeather, a middle-class young man of devoutness who is reading for the Church, a naive character exposed to the madness and decay of the outer world. His misfortunes begin with the annual dinner of Oxford's fashionable Bollinger Club when he bicycled happily back at night from a meeting of the League of Nations Union to the College. He thought of smoking a pipe and reading another chapter of the Forsyte Saga before going to bed. He knocked at the gate, was admitted, put away his bicycle, as always, and made his way across the quad towards his room, but he was surprised to find himself among a drunken group of students. He tried to pass quietly but they caught him, set on him, removed all his clothes and forced him to run naked

73 around the University Campus while Mr. Sniggs, the Junior Dean, and Mr. Postlethwait, the domestic butler, were in their rooms overlooking the inner court of Scone College, only watching and listening to a "confused roaring and breaking of glass." The second day, after a senior meeting of the College, Paul was expelled from Oxford for indecent behaviour though it was not his responsibility; even his guardian refused to give him any money of his inheritance under the allegation that he is not a student any more due to the conditions of the will of Paul's father.

Paul was oddly not surprised to find himself qualifying for the position of schoolmaster at Llanabba Castle, Wales, where he became one of a bunch of misfit teachers. His new colleagues, Prendergast and Captain Grimes, were not real teachers. Prindergast was a failed clergyman because of his ‘doubts’, Grimes was a person of doubtful reputation who has had different jobs before becoming a teacher who did whatever he liked. In addition to this there is Dr. Fagan who was an incompetent headmaster.

Sports Day arrives at Llanabba School, and with it Margot Beste-Chetwynde, a widow and the mother of, Peter, one of Paul’s students, attracts Paul’s attention. Prendergast accidently shoots a young athlete, Lord Tangent, in the leg with a pistol, while his mother, Lady Circumference, seems annoyed. Later Paul declares his love to Margot and gives up his job at the school after she accepts his offer of marriage and persuades him to stay at King's Thursday, an antique house that Margot has acquired, and help her with her economic affairs which extend to South America. On the morning of their wedding he is arrested on the charge of trafficking in the white slave trade and sent to prison though he is one of Margot's victims. In the

74 prison he was with his schoolmaster friends, Prindergast, Grimes and Philbrick, the butler of the school, who are there for different reasons. His fiancé comes to visit him in prison, and tells him she is going to marry someone else. At the end and after finishing more than a year in the prison she helps him to escape through a fabricated dead story and goes back to the College under a name of a remote cousin. The novel comes full circle as Paul returns to his college in Oxford to resume his theological studies.

Decline and Fall is universally admired as a delightful satiric comedy of a high order. On 23 September 1928, after the publication of the novel, Gerald Gould (1985 –1936), poet, critic and one of the influential journalists of the Observer commented:

Decline and Fall is funny, richly and roaringly funny. Its hero is a master in a school, is involved [unwillingly] in the White Slave Traffic, and is sent to prison…. Over the first half of his book I have laughed consumedly: I hope you will do the same. (Gould 81)

Douglas Lane Patey remarks that a number of reviewers, in 1930, showed their admiration for Waugh's Decline and Fall; they were lavish with words like, 'outrageous', 'audacious', impertinent' and 'smart'; they concluded that:

Mr. Waugh is very clever and amusing, but, above all, he is smart. The only book which could be read… without giving the impression of dowdiness is 'Decline and Fall'… One feels the same awe – stricken admiration for it as one feels for 'the last war' in a car or a hat or any other triumphant expression of the spirit, not of the age, but of the moments. (Patey 34)

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Arnold Bennett has praised this novel in an essay in the Evening Standard on 11 October 1928. He remarked that "It is an uncompromising and brilliantly malicious satire, which in my opinion comes near to being quite first–rate…I say without reserves that this novel delighted me." (Bennett 82). On the other hand, Fredrick J. Stopp observes that "In short, this first novel is an excellent sample of Mr. Waugh's method of mixing farce, comedy of character and satire." (Stopp 64). While Michael Gorra observes that "Decline and Fall is the final and funniest book in the dandy-aesthete tradition and is in many ways a perfect novel-perfect above all in the ease with which it remains inside its boundaries." (Gorra 206) Waugh's friend, Cyril Connolly also praised Decline and Fall for its "subtle metallic humour, which seems a product of this generation." (Connolly, 1928, 86). Connolly added that "The author possesses the comic spirit. All his characters are alive, the dialogue is natural and sparkling… Decline and Fall…is a funny book, and the only one that, professionally, he has ever read twice." (87). While Brook Allen dared to announce that:

Decline and Fall is the best among Waugh's novels. “And it is likely to say that posterity will come to judge Waugh's master piece to be not Brideshead or even A Handful of Dust, powerful though it is, or the brilliant The Loved One, but Decline and Fall, his first, most characteristic, and most vital novel.” (Allen 88)

The title of the novel Decline and Fall directly makes an allusion to Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Critics and historians as well agree that there is clear similarity between the Roman Empire and the Britain Empire, in the sense that like the Romans, the British have also established an Empire that reached its

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height but declined and fall. Through an accurate study for the reasons behind the fall of the Roman Empire, one can find that the decadence and immorality of the aristocrats and common people as well, associated with the emergence of new rising power of barbarians were the main reasons. Therefore, in this novel, Waugh deals with the same objects. Waugh mocks the English people especially the upper and the middle class as well for being faithless, undisciplined, decadent, immoral and valueless. Frederick L. Beaty remarks that due to the influence of Gibbon's works and his ironical method Waugh chose the title of this novel from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. (Beaty, 1992: 15).

As in most of his works, the material of this novel is derived from Waugh's personal experiences of his early life in addition to the general social life of the period he depicts. Accordingly, the themes like cultural change and confusion, moral disintegration and social decay, chaos of modern life, loss of faith, extra–material sex, and white slave trade are clearly portrayed. Consequently, Harry Blamiers observes that:

This novel contains images of the modern world as manic, mechanized and incomprehensible; it is essentially about the problem of how to live in a society which seems meaningless… the stance of Waugh is detached and invisible. (Blamiers, 1983: 121)

3.2 A Handful of Dust (1934)

In his novel, A Handful of Dust (1934), Waugh criticizes English society in his portrayal of the shallow lives of the Bright Young People. This novel deals with a view that the modern man is

77 wandering in a world empty of moral and religious values. Waugh felt the need to defend his conversion in an article entitled 'Converted to Rome: Why it has Happened to Me' (1930).This essay shows a key insight into Waugh's thinking in the early thirties, as it reveals his reflections on his personal faith and sets up his stance on how religion should relate to Europe civilization. Waugh explained that he decided to convert out of his own free will: "there is no coaxing or tricking people into acquiescence", and he added that he was not merely "captivated by the ritual" (EAR 103). Furthermore, Waugh did not view his conversion as a case of simply accepting doctrine and having "his mind make up for him" (EAR 103), nor did he think his new faith had limited his perspective in terms of his literary work or intellectual exploration. On the contrary, Waugh insisted that if one "has an active mind, the Roman system can and does form a basis for the most various intellectual and artistic activity" (EAR 103).

A Handful of Dust examines the themes of contemporary immorality, the death of spiritual values, lack of faith, and the futility of modern man. Tony Last, an honest man is represented as a victim of modern society. He is a young country gentleman and the owner of Hetton Abbey; a relic of Victorian Gothic Architecture. He lives at Hetton with his wife, Brenda, and their sole eight-year spoiled son John Andrew. His attachment to an ideal feudal past is so profound that he is blind to his wife's boredom of the country life. One of Tony's lower-class friends John Beaver, jobless, and a social-climbing idler, comes to visit Tony for the weekend to Hetton. Tony and Brenda put on a good face and accept him as he is well-connected, though without real wealth.

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Beaver's mamma, Mrs. Beaver who makes money in real estate rentals, sees Brenda as a positive revenue stream. Unknown to Tony, Beaver and Brenda have an affair and become close lovers while he is paying for a small apartment in London city that Mrs. Beaver rents to the adulterous wife who lies to her husband, and he believes everything he is told. Miss. Ripon loses control of her horse in the hunting-field at Hetton's farm and kills John Andrew. While his cherished mother, Brenda, has been busy with her cad lover.

As a result of such incestuous union Tony and Brenda think of divorce. But Tony calls off the divorce, when he realizes that he will have to sell Hetton Abbey, something he is not willing to do after Brenda's lawyer comes forward to ask thousands of pounds for Brenda’s alimony. To run away of his familial problems Tony travels with a mission to explore the Brazilian jungle looking for a lost city with a stupid explorer Dr. Messinger. In the Brazilian jungle they are deserted by their porters and Dr. Messinger goes out looking for a help, where he drowned and died, while Tony was left alone in the camp very sick. Coming to a brutal finale, an illiterate man, Mr. Todd, half English and half Indian, who lives in the jungle found Tony, cured him but imprisoned him to read the whole works of Dickens aloud to him. Todd drugged Tony and hid him elsewhere to avoid the rescue attempt of the English search party, telling them that Tony had died. He gave them Tony's wristwatch and showed them the cross erected in his honour. The novel closes with the marriage of Brenda with, Jock Grant-Menzies, a young M.P. and one of Tony's best friends and now Tony's cousin owns Hetton though Tony is still alive.

However, following the breakup of his marriage Tony forsakes his ancestral residence to unearth a new heaven. When Tony is

79 imprisoned by Todd, Waugh indicates that innocence does not pay, and death-in-life is what Tony gets as a reward of his secular humanism. Step by step Tony discovers Todd's bad intentions to imprison him in the jungle for good especially after he found a note written by his forerunner, the dead black man, stating Todd's promise to let him go, but of course he didn’t: "Year 1919… I James Todd of Brazil do swear to Barnabas Washington of Georgetown that if he finish this book in fact Martin Chuzzlewit I will let him go away back as soon as finished." (HD 217). Here Tony realizes that his fate will be like his predecessor who was only liberated by death, especially when Todd shows him kind of warm-hearted acceptance to his demand for freedom because Todd is completely sure that Tony cannot leave and survive unaided in the jungle. "… my friend… you are under no restraint go when you like." (217) Nevertheless, Todd does not stop his foxy plans to keep Tony with him. He drugged Tony and hid him elsewhere to avoid the rescue attempt of the English search party, giving them Tony’s wristwatch after he told them that Tony had died and showing them the cross erected in his honour. So the search team fails to track Tony, as Todd drugs him, who was sleeping during their arrival and departure. This is symbolized by Todd's trickery and Tony's unworldly innocence where only his watch is taken back. Now Todd assures himself of no more interference from the outside world and only when Tony asks him about his missing wristwatch he told him the truth:

‘You haven’t seen my watch anywhere?’ ‘You have missed it?’ ‘Yes I thought I was wearing it. I say, I’ve never slept so long.’ ‘Not since you were a baby. Do you know how long? Two days.’ ‘Nonsense. I can’t have.’ ‘Yes, indeed. It is a long time. It is a pity because you missed our guest.’

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‘Guests?’…. Three men from outside. Englishmen. It is a pity you missed them. A pity for them, too, as they particularly wished to see you. But what could I do? You were so sound asleep. They had come all the way to find you, so- I thought you would not mind – as you could not greet them yourself, I gave them a little souvenir, your watch. (HD 220-221)

This is a symbol of Tony's inability to go beyond the dissanctified temporal order which has imprisoned him. After the search team goes back to England without him, Hetton is given to its heirs. The City of Man instead of the City of God is what Tony gets in the form of Todd’s mud hut instead of Tony’s illusion of Camelot (legendary capital of King Arthur's Kingdom in England) as a happy haven. Waugh celebrates domesticity and religious status to suggest that man can make himself ideally at home in the degraded secular world.

Waugh ironically presents this view as a symbol of the deterioration of traditional faith. Sentimental sympathy of the women in the passage quoted at the beginning of the novel describing the fire and the strangling of the baby in the grave yard is repeated in Todd's changing emotions from laughter to tears when Tony reads Dickens. While Todd weeps over injustices that Dickens describes, yet he commits crimes against Tony. This act of Todd is symbolic of Victorian and modern morality to offset the decadent modern religious belief. It indicates that no relation exists between literature and conduct, this is evoked by Conrad that modern fear of savagery and civilization are variations on a theme. There are different shades of darkness, of hypocrisy and selfishness. As Tony and Marlow are trapped in jungles of one type or another, they evoke a similar

81 thematic predicament. Conrad's group is used by Waugh to undermine the humanist position. There is mutual blame game in both of them. Conrad's questioning opinion of human nature, world view, and humanitarian efforts recall Waugh's own view.

A Handful of Dust has been explored by Edward Lobb as a novel where the Victorian brand of ‘humanism’ is a failed project. It is "…a macabre and allusive image of humanism’s dead end , it conflates past and present, myth and history, the primitive and the civilized, and uses the protagonist’s quest to show us a heart of darkness." (Lobb, 2003: 143). Frank Kermode calls it "…one of the most distinguished novels of the century." (Kermode, 2002: 283). While Priestly remarked that "I don't think a better book than the others... there is in it a bitter force beyond anything that appeared in the others. The end, too, is a glorious example of the funny-grotesque- horrible." (Quoted in Sykes,1985: 202).

Some critics consider this novel a satiric story, others like Northrop Fry remarks that the novel is 'close to a parody of tragic irony', because its irony is closer to tragedy than satire. (Quoted in Beaty, 1992: 86). While Earnest Oldmeadow remarks that, Waugh hardly tries to entertain his reader through the use of satire "But ‘A Handful of Dust’ is not well done. The author has not made a clear choice between tragicomedy and farce." (Oldmeadow, 2002: 151). Rose Macaulay described it as "a social novel about adultery, treachery, betrayal, tragic and sordid desolation." She adds that the novel "seems to reach the climax of Mr. Waugh's view of life as a meaningless jigging of barbarous nit-wits." (Macaulay, 2002: 158).

While David Wykes goes as far as to observe that "A Handful of Dust is Waugh's greatest single achievement...It is Waugh's best novel

82 because it is his most courageous and skillful act of fictional autobiography." (Wykes, 1999: 103). Harold Acton has all praise for the novel: "Written in blood have all too readily found in that succession of tales of men betrayed by women evidence of a deep and enduring psychological wound." (Patey, 1998: 32). Lobb remarks that Tony's journey is similar to the journey of Marlow and Krutz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Tony has to cross, as Marlow, a dangerous river and encounter a mad European who tyrannizes over the natives (Lobb, 2004: 132).

Waugh says about his novel A Handful of Dust "The scheme was a Gothic man in the hands of savages - first Mrs. Beaver etc. then the real ones, finally the silver foxes at Hetton. All that quest for a city seems to me justifiable symbolism." (Letters 103). After twelve years of publishing this novel, Waugh explained that A Handful of Dust "my favourite hitherto, dealt entirely with behaviour. It was humanist and contained all I had to say about humanism." (Waugh,1946: 252). In which he depicts a pessimistic modern portrait and the bankruptcy of humanism which cut off from its religious roots. Concerning Waugh’s humanism, Stannard remarks that:

His use of the term ‘humanism’ is eclectic. He seems to mean that vision of the world which places man, not God, at the centre of existence, and which believes that ‘knowledge’, and thus ‘progress’, derive from the observation of behaviour (Stannard, 1986, 378).

On the other hand Patey comments that "Humanism in it is modern, secular form, with its denial of sin and utopian belief in a satisfying human order achievable by purely human means, had been a central target of Waugh’s satire since Decline and Fall." (Patey, 1998: 118). Whereas Frederick J. Stopp remarks that:

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All Mr. Waugh had to say about humanism in 1934 was that it was helpless in the face of modern savagery. Decency, humanity and devotion have failed….Man is doomed to remain in his wire cage, reinforced against escape, unless some other principle is found to restore to him his liberty and to banish fear. (Stopp,100)

3.3 Love Among the Ruins (1953)

In this novella, Waugh presents the character of Miles Plastic as the protagonist of the story who was convicted with the crime of arson to represent the picture of modern man. In the prison, Miles listens to classical music as a lover of Tennyson. After his release, Plastic gets a job at a state-run euthanasia center in which the government selects people who have negative qualities. Actually, the drama of the story begins when Clara, a bearded ballerina woman, who has changed her mind about the process, does not want to die. Plastic arranges her escape from the centre and then the two begin to live in romantic life. Clara suddenly disappears and later she is found in a hospital recovering from an abortion and her former bearded face is replaced by a rubber jaw. After visiting her in the hospital, Plastic goes to his former prison to set it on fire. Unidentified as the perpetrator of the crime, Plastic is elevated as a lecturer on the worthiness of the system. Hysterically, Plastic burns himself at the end of the process.

According to Waugh, that the real criminals get a comfortable and relaxing life whereas the innocents suffer much from the hard circumstances. In this sense, G. C. Thornley and Gwyneth Roberts state that:

Waugh enjoys the comic effects of confusion, physical as well as moral; his characters can be persuaded to do

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anything and to accept any idea, however laughable it is, and the innocent people suffer while the real criminals are not punished. (Thornley and Roberts, 1984, 155)

However, in Love Among the Ruins, Waugh tries to reflect a horrible future – a short nightmare on the topic of the Socialist State of Euthanasia centre as the main scene of the story. In such a world, only prisoners feel comfortable, whereas the people outside are arranged in a long queue for euthanasia. It is a horrible world empty of justice and mercy – a world of no responsibility. Actually, the Welfare State has acquired a complete power to slay many innocent people. Waugh criticizes such a dreadful deed by making fun on the government of the Labour Party. The politicians, like most of our politicians of our time, only make promises and shaking hands with voters before elections but after they win they do nothing. Despite their promises at the last election, the politicians had not yet changed the climate. The state Meteorological institute had so far produced only an unseasonable fall of snow and two little thunderbolts no larger than apricots. The weather varied from day to day and from county to county as it had done of old, most anomalously. (LATR 1)

In an interview, against the justifications of the government's supporters concerning the use of taxes. Waugh comments that "the real enemies of society are sitting snug behind typewriters and microphones, pursuing their work of destruction and popular applause…" (Davis, 1989: 221). In 1951 when he presented himself as a candidate of the public private figure for the Rectorship at Edinburgh University, Waugh again confirmed his negative stand against the public figures, especially the politicians, and remarked that:

I have never gone into public life. Most of the ills we suffer are caused by people going into public life. I have never

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voted in a parliamentary election. I believe a man's chief civil duty consists in figuring for his King when the men have raised a family and paid such taxes as I find unavoidable. I have learned and practiced a very difficult trade with some fair success. (Bradbury, 1964,1-2)

David Wykes remarks that Love Among the Ruins "…is a tiny skirmish in his [Waugh] war against the Modern Age and almost the exception to the rule that nothing he wrote is unreadable. The time of its publication was one of mounting mental stress that was about to come to a crisis" (Wykes, 1999: 178-179). While Christopher Sykes eagerly supported Waugh's Love Among the Ruins:

…if the book is not easily defended, it was the occasion of a not easily forgotten tribute. At a chance gathering of people, all of whom read and knew Evelyn, one of the company remarked that the book was not only disappointing but even bad, to be met with the telling rejoinder: 'Oh yes, but even so Evelyn writing badly is so much better than other people writing well'. (Sykes, 1985: 476)

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Chapter Four

Analysis of The Novels

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Chapter Four Analysis of the Novels

4.0 The Century of The Common Man

In Decline and Fall Waugh portrays a conflict of feeble restraint with destructive liberty. To reflect his vision of the human world as a ceaseless and purposeless, Waugh starts Decline and Fall with a painful chaos at Oxford, one of the most esteemed English Universities. Waugh uses irony, laughter and ridicule to convey the events of the novel. He brilliantly makes use of both farce and satire at the same time. The book opens with the last annual meeting of the Bollinger Club in Oxford three years before, he recounts that, as a kind of tradition its members brought a fox in a cage and stoned it to death with champagne bottles. Waugh ironically scorns them saying "What an evening that had been!" (DF 9). Through this event Waugh tries to reflect the foolishness, triviality and the low level of humanity of those aristocratic and rich students, and the old members who had rallied for the occasion. Waugh describes such annual parties, as a difficult time for those who are in charge at the College, because these spoiled students who used to damage whatever they can get on their way from the College's properties. In fact their acts prove themselves to be barbarians than aristocrats. Waugh mocks them commenting:

It was a lovely evening. They broke up Mr. Austen's grand piano, and stamped Lord Rending's cigars into his carpet, and smashed his china, and tore up Mr. Partridge's sheets, and threw the Matisse into his water–jug; Mr. Sanders had nothing to break except his windows, but they found the manuscript at which he had been working for the Newdigate Prize Poem, and had great fun with that. Sir

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Alastair Digby–Vane– Trumpington felt quite ill with excitement, and was supported to bed by Lumsden of Strathdrummond. It was half–past eleven. Soon the evening would come to an end. But there was still a treat to come. (DF 11)

With reference to the confusion, anarchy, and the savage, aggressive and uncivilized manners of the rich members of the Bollinger Club; Frederick L. Beaty remarks that "Members of the Bollinger Club, in their destruction of items symbolizing music, art, and poetry, prove themselves not just indifferent but hostile to culture." (Beaty, 1992: 34).

Through, the consequences of events, Waugh not only mocks and criticizes the students, but also strongly satirizes their teachers, because everything happened in front of the two heads of the College Mr. Sniggs and Mr. Postlethwait, but they did nothing. Waugh makes fun of the two officials because they are concerned only with how much money they are going to collect from these students on the account of the fines that may be imposed on them:

The fines!' said Mr. Sniggs, gently rubbing his pipe along the side of his nose. 'Oh my! The fines there'll be after this evening!'…. 'There must be fifty of them at least, said Mr. Postlethwait. 'If only they were all members of the College! Fifty of them at ten pounds each. Oh my!' (DF 10)

Through this dialogue, Waugh suggests that those who are in charge of the College are corrupted and are looking only for their personal benefits. They didn't care either for the decline of the moral standards of their students, nor for the chaos and disorder they created. However, by portraying such disorder in one of the famous educational Institutions, Scone College which embodied Oxford,

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Waugh wants to show that even Oxford has become part of the fallen world.

While they are enjoying their riotous evening, Paul Pennyfeather, the protagonist of this novel, comes back bicycling happily from a meeting of the League of Nations Union where there had been a most interesting paper about plebiscites in Poland. He knocked at the gate of Scone College, was admitted, put away his bicycle and thinks of smoking a pipe and reading another chapter of the Forsyte Saga before going to bed. As usual, he has to make his way across the quad towards his room, surprisingly he finds himself among a lot of people. "What a lot of people there seemed to be about! Paul had no particular objection to drunkenness…but he was consumedly shy of drunkenness…Paul tried to pass….'Here's an awful man wearing the Baller tie, 'said the Laird'." (DF 12). Yet, he has to pass through the drunken members of the Bollinger Club who are unable to distinguish between Paul's old school bore a marked resemblance tie to the pale blue and white of the Bollinger Club. They set on him, remove his clothes and force him to run naked in the square of the campus. "Paul Pennyfeather was able to handle the idea of drunkenness but completely unprepared to face the drunkard." (McCartney, 2004: 116). However, those, supposedly in charge lack the will to impose the order they represent. They cautiously remain, in their rooms observing throughout such an anarchical evening with their lights off to avoid any possible confrontation with the impetuous Bollingers. Even when Mr. Sniggs mistakenly thinks that Paul is Lord Rending, he anxiously wonders whether they should do something to protect the young nobleman from any hurt, his colleague Mr. Postlethwait said:

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'No, Sniggs,' said Mr. Postlethwait, laying a hand on his impetuous colleague's arm. 'No, no, no. It would be unwise. We have the prestige of the senior common room to consider. In their present state they might not prove amenable to discipline. We must at all costs avoid an outrage.' (DF 13)

Both coward seniors greatly felt at ease when they discover the Bollinger's victim is only Paul Pennyfeather who is a man of no importance as they said; an untitled individual of no account. "But it's quite all right. It isn’t Rending. It’s Pennyfeather–someone of no importance.' Well, that saves a great deal of trouble. I am glad, Sniggs; I am, really. What a lot of clothes the young man appears to have lost!" (DF 13). It is really an act of inhumanity and selfishness. Those seniors are not shocked and they did not help, instead, they hide and dream about a week of Founder's port “only brought up when the College fines have reached £ 50. We shall have a week of it at least, said Mr. Postlethwait, "a week of Founder's port'' (10) and hoping to gain large fines from the evening's destruction of the Chapel by the Bollinger's "Oh, please God, make them attack the Chapel." (10). Portraying such a scene of a negative reaction of these seniors, most critics agree that Waugh wants to say that the negative position of Sniggs and Postlethwait is a real sign of the general failure of society to keep a satisfying logical order. Adding to that, for those wealthy students, such fines, of course mean nothing, and the one who is going to be punished is Paul Pennyfeather only for having his trousers stolen:

The world has turned barbarous again. Waugh suggests, because the delegated custodians of civilized values have neither the courage nor the conviction necessary to their task. But the problem of authority goes much further than a

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cowardly bureaucracy. Sniggs and Postlethwait are only symptoms of the general failure of society to sustain a convincing rational order. (McCartney, 2004: 11)

The next morning there is "a lovely College meeting." (DF 13), ironically Waugh says. As a result, Pennyfeather is unfairly expelled for indecent behaviour "The sort of young man does the College no good." said Sniggs. (13), though the fact that he is a very well- mannered man. He is a good student, quiet, and humble. But, unfortunately these qualities help in his expulsion because he leaves quietly without any objection, he indulges in as a soliloquy while he is driven to the station, 'God damn and blast them all to hell,' said Paul meekly to himself as he drove to the station, and then he felt rather ashamed, because he rarely swore.' (DF 14). In fact, this soft soliloquy is the sole protest heard in the whole book against such a fallen and unjust world. Waugh pushed Pennyfeather in this fallen world experiencing disaster after disaster through a series of disorderly picaresque adventures. "Paul's expulsion for something of which he was completely innocent, represents a further miscarriage of justice." (Beaty, 1992: 36).

Hence, through the early events in the course of Paul's life Waugh tries to reflect the unbalanced conflict between order and anarchy in which Paul Pennyfeather, a student of theology who has spent three years living at Scone College without any problems, is unfairly punished. Due to the unfavourable attitude of the Scone College's deans who decided to punish Paul instead of punishing the anarchic Bollinger students, it is brought to light that Paul's expulsion is not because of his indecent behaviour, but due to his poverty and inability to pay fine like the aristocratic Bollingers. So, he is considered guilty and expelled from the College. In such a chaotic

92 world, Waugh is trying to say that the intellectual atmosphere embodied in the body of Scone College, on one hand, and Paul's character on the other hand, proves to be inefficient, paralyzed and worthless to face the barbarous will of the Bollingers. Thus, Paul being in confrontation with the real world for the first time, he is going to be in a series of shocks in such a fallen world.

After his unjust expulsion from Oxford, Paul is in another unfair confrontation with his guardian. Paul's guardian kicked him out of his home on the pretext of his fear about his daughter due to Paul’s indecent behaviour at Oxford. The guardian not only expelled Paul from his house but he deprived him from the interest of the five thousand pounds which Paul's father has left, saying that the sum is only for Paul's education, and it will be given to him on his twenty- first birthday according to the will of Paul's father. "Paul Pennyfeather discovers that his guardian has used the occasion of his undeserved dismissal from Scone College as a pretext to cheat him of his inheritance." (McCartney, 2004: 77). Commenting on the behaviour of Paul's guardian David Wykes remarks that:

With his guardian's realization that since the young man has been expelled in disgrace, he can legally appropriate Paul's inheritance and throw him out of the house, and can do so while uttering moralistic platitudes about 'fulfilling the trust that your poor father placed in me'… Waugh is determined to force from his reader, by the acquiescence of laughter, the admission that, yes, the world is like this: arbitrary, unjust, mendacious and hilarious. (Wykes, 1999: 62)

As he criticizes the behaviour of Paul’s guardian, Waugh also criticizes the way of Paul's assignment as a school teacher. Paul is

93 assigned as a teacher though he left the University without any degree. Dr. Fagan, the headmaster of Llanabba Preparatory School, a private public school in North Wales, advertised a private and conditional notice for the need of a teacher with special qualifications; Waugh ridicules the fake multiple requirements of Dr. Fagan's notice:

Private and Confidential Notice of Vacancy. Augustus Fagan, Esquire, Ph.D., Llanabba Castle, N. Wales, requires immediately junior assistant master to teach Classics and English to University Standard with Subsidiary Mathematics, German, French. Experience essential; first – class games essential…. 'Might have been made for you, said Mr. Levy [scholastic agents]. 'But I don't know a word of German, I've had no experience, I've got no testimonials, and I can't play cricket. Said Paul' (DF 16 – 17)

However, the result is very funny because Paul got the job as a teacher in Llanabba School, without fulfilling any terms of Dr. Fagan's notice. Waugh's mockery for such a bad system of education is continued, when Dr. Fagan contradicted himself and his notice about the special requirements for the qualification of the teacher they want. During the interview with Paul, Dr. Fagan says that 'I understand you have had no previous experience?' Paul answered 'No, sir, I am afraid not.' then Dr. Fagan says 'Well, of course, that is in many ways an advantage.' (DF, 18). Even when Paul told Dr. Fagan that he has been sent down from the University for indecent behaviour "I was sent down, sir, for indecent behaviour.' 'Indeed, indeed? Well, I shall not ask for details." (18). Dr. Fagan does not care, as if such things were very normal in the body of the educational system.

As it is a big Castle Waugh gives Llanabba School a large place in Decline and Fall due to its role in the transmission of culture.

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Ironically, Waugh portrays it as a Victorian country house embellished with a fake – medieval facade. It proves how Victorian values have become corrupted after the Great War of 1914. Ironically, Waugh forces Dr. Fagan the headmaster of Llanabba School to say while he is interviewing Paul Pennyfeather "You will find that my school is built upon an ideal – an ideal of service and fellowship." (DF, 19). At the time that there is no idealness in this school whether in the staff and their pupils or in the educational system the school follows, where there is a failure of discipline "There's no discipline in the place," as Grimes says. (22). Even Mr. Levy, the scholastic agent, while he is talking with Paul says that the statue of the school is at the lowest order among the four grades of class schools "Llanabba hasn't a good name in the profession… Frankly, said Mr. Levy, 'school is pretty bad…so far as I know, there are only two other candidates, and one of them is totally deaf, poor fellow." (DF 17).

Waugh’s mockery of the educational system continues, for instance Mr. Levy told Paul that this job might have been made especially for him, though Paul told him that "… I don’t know a word of German, I've no experience, I've got no testimonials, and I can't play cricket." (17). To heighten his mockery Waugh made Mr. Levy protest to Paul's confession of his unsuitability as a schoolmaster, revealing how they assigned a teacher in the last term in spite of his inefficiency "… only last term we sent a man who had never been in a laboratory in his life as senior Science Master to one of our leading public schools. He came wanting to do private coaching in music." (17).

However, at Llanabba School Paul Pennyfeather becomes a teacher in spite of the fact that he didn’t complete his education, but to

95 satirize Llanabba School in particular and the English education system in general, and to mock Llanabba's staff, Waugh introduced Paul's new colleagues, Grimes and Mr. Prendergast as unprofessional teachers. Grimes is a man of uncertain reputation and did different jobs before becoming a teacher. While, Prendergast is a failed clergyman who was once a minister of a 'beautiful church' but he was fired because of his 'doubts'. Even the headmaster, Dr. Fagan, is not less in comparison with the incompetence of Llanabba School's teachers. He is in love with fake appearances and trivial compliments especially with the rich families of his pupils, only to disguise the reality of the school he leads. Neither he nor the masters he employs affect the pupils in any positive way.

Stressing such a decline of morality Waugh makes Dr. Fagan reveal the whole fake policy of the school's education system when he tells Paul that "We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit." (DF 24). Hence, Waugh not only shows Grimes a liar but Dr. Fagan, the headmaster of the school.

Grimes comes but is followed by a boy who is to be punished for whistling. To justify his behaviour, and to show the anarchic nature of the school, the boy claims that "Everyone else was whistling,' said the boy." (22). Grimes tries to punish this boy and threatens to beat him, "with this, said Grimes, waving the walking stick. 'That wouldn't hurt much,' said the boy, and went out. 'There's no discipline in the place,' said Grimes, and then he went out too."(22). Through such threatening of beating by stick Waugh also wants to reflect the harsh process and the failure of the teaching system in the school. Such atmosphere led Paul to think "I wonder whether I'm going to enjoy being a schoolmaster," (22).

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Waugh has not only portrayed Grimes as a bad example of teachers but as a bad man and immoral too. Although he is married, he does not hesitate to engage, Flossie, the daughter of Dr. Fagan, only to protect his job for not being fired, but he failed to achieve his plan therefore he ran away on the wedding day when his secret is about to be discovered; fabricating a fake story of his own suicide so nobody might run after him. "Just before luncheon a youth presented himself at the Castle with a little pile of clothes he had found on the seashore. They were identified without difficulty as having belonged to the Captain."(DF 113-114).

Therefore, the enfeebled modern soul, in this novel, is represented in the figure of Mr. Prendergast who 'can’t keep order' (DF 27) as Captain Grimes said. This 'Modern Churchman', as Waugh describes him, has been schooled by the Church of England to explain his religious doubts which he could not understand as he says "I couldn't understand why God had made the world at all." (33). To mock and increase the problem of Mr. Prendergast's doubts, Waugh makes Prendergast reveal that even his bishop couldn’t answer him. "I asked my bishop; he didn’t know. He said that he didn’t think the point really arose as far as my practical duties as a parish priest were considered." (33).

Hence, through such a sharp religious satire mostly Waugh wants to say that the disparagement of the Anglican Church to the catholic bishop’s authority has destroyed the Christian genuine faith. Because of this Waugh called Mr. Prendergast as 'Modern Churchman' who left his post at Llanabba School after discovering that modernity has supplied him with means to continue his religious mission with no need for religious faith. He becomes the Chaplain at the prison office

97 of Blackstone Gaol preaching prisoners despite his lack of faith. "I've only been at the job a week. I was very lucky to get it. My bishop said he thought there was more opening for a Modern Churchman in this kind of work than in the parishes. The Governor is very modern too."(165). In the prison Waugh shows the same failure of discipline of Scone College and Llanabba School when he portrays Prendergast as a Chaplain of the prison, complaining from the absence of discipline which reminds him of the same trouble in Llanabba School. "What's the matter, Prendy? Doubts again? Paul asked him in the prison. 'No, no, discipline, my old trouble… criminals are just as bad as boys, I find. said Prendergast." (DF 165). Recognizing him as 'no Christian'(147), Prendergast's head is cut off by the crazed prisoner 'mystical homicide', a former carpenter suffering from religious hallucinations. "I am the Lord's appointed,' said the carpenter.’ I am the sword of Israel; I am the lion of the Lord's elect'." (178). Hence, like Prendergast's head, Waugh wants to reveal that both religion and authority when cut off from the roots becomes faithless and powerless.

In this novel, Waugh reconfirms his philosophy about the existence of man, when Grimes said that "There's no escape. As individuals we simply do not exist. We are just potential home- builders, beavers, and ants." (DF 102). Prendergast, in contrast to Grimes, has never come to terms with the sense of human nature, and as the one who is, no Christian, embodied the character of a Modern Churchman. Accordingly, in an indirect way, Waugh implies that there is a divine justice in the murder of Prendergast. "From all points of view it was lucky that the madman had chosen Mr. Prendergast for attack. Some people even suggested that the choice had been made in

98 a more responsible quarter….Mr. Prendergast's death passed almost unnoticed." (DF 184).

Waugh has worked hard to portray the society of Decline and Fall as a typical modern one. The world which embodies all the characteristics of the modern world where there is a clear shortage of the intimate relationship between its individuals. In spite of this they are dealing with each other and living together as families. Therefore, as readers, we cannot feel the real intimacy in such a society. In fact such relationships embody the real portrait of the modern society, in which there is no real love but only a mutual material relationship.

Waugh makes this very clear through portraying such relationship between all the characters in this novel. The eldest daughter of Dr. Fagan behaves in impolite way with her father. "He's a regular Tarter, is Dad, but then you know what scholars are – inhuman. Ain't you,' said Miss Fagan, turning on her father with sudden ferocity–'ain't you inhuman." (DF 23–24). We also see how Mrs. Circumferences does not pay much attention to her son when Mr. Prendergast shot him on his leg by mistake. We see how Mr. Grimes does not care for his first wife and he engaged Miss Flossie the eldest daughter of Dr. Fagan and how he directly after wedding ran away and left her. We see also how Mrs. Margot left Paul and married another man in spite of his being faithful, when he sacrificed his freedom and reputation for the sake of her name and reputation though he is innocent.

Through this novel Waugh expects the break out of another war. When Lord Circumference met for the first time Paul Pennyfeather at the Sports day, they start talking about the benefit of sport for the boys. Paul said that sport is so good for the boys and it is very useful

99 in the conditions of a war or anything. Oh, yes,' said Paul. 'I think they’re so good for the boys.' Do you? Do you think that?' said Lord Circumference very earnestly… 'So useful in case of a war or anything,' said Paul… Do you really and truly think so? That there's going to be another war, I mean?' 'Yes, I'm sure of it; aren’t?' 'Yes, of course. I'm sure of it too….Who do you think it will be this time?' 'The Americans, said Paul stoutly. (DF 68)

When Margot, the wealthy widow, bought the old country house, King's Thursday which belonged to the reign of Marian Tudor, she finds that the house is in need of a lot of modern requirements like "lifts and labour–saving devices, for hot water taps and cold–water taps and (horrible innovation!) drinking water taps, for gas–rings, and electric ovens." (DF 117). And when she decided to rebuild this palace, the matter became a public issue "King's Thursday gradually became the Mecca of week–end parties" (116), because it belonged and represented the old–world, which for Waugh was the world of the old tradition and the glorious values.

In fact, for Waugh, the renovation of King's Thursday by a modern architect named Professor Otto Silenus represents the destruction of the traditional Catholic ideal. Through that, he clearly warns against the threat posed by the urban sprawl to the English countryside in general and to the old building in particular. Waugh also tries to show the distaste of the shabby styles of architecture appearing in England at that time. There is impropriety governing Margot's new house which designed in a promiscuous modern way reflects the chaotic scene of the age.

Such atmosphere is also connected with Margot's immorality as a white slaving business woman, who is accused of murdering her first

100 husband. In a review in 1937 Waugh remarked that "The heroine is straight from the 1920s-elusive, irresponsible, promiscuous, a little wistful, avaricious, delectable, ruthless– how often we have all read or written about such people. Well, the type wears well." (Quoted in Patey, 1998: 62)

Therefore, through the description of Margot's country house King's Thursday Waugh depicts modern disorder, generated by the rejection of the Catholic Church. "…the great house as a symbol of a lost order of tradition and of culture in flux. Built during 'the reign of Bloody Mary' (DF 115). Hence, it may be said that the obvious sense of the origin of King's Thursday to the reign of a Catholic monarch suggests that the house stands for kind of counterreformation in a period full of anarchic destruction. Therefore, some critics agree that the destruction and resurrection of King's Thursday in modern style suggests that this old house stands in contrast to the loss of Catholic values by modern liberty. Waugh was not a Catholic when he wrote Decline and Fall, but he starts to see the loss of faith in Christianity and the lack of confidence in the moral and social standards in the behaviour of modern man. Patey argues that:

Decline and Fall mocks modern architecture, modern penology, modern education, modern churchmanship –even modern photography – not merely to discredit the new, but to point up the need for a paper ground of value in all these areas, an 'objective ethics' without which man's fallen nature cannot be restrained and his energies fruitfully channelled…. The novels from Decline and Fall onward develop a symbolic shorthand designed at once to convey a sense of modern disorder and explain its causes. (Patey,1998: 59)

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However, the metamorphosis of King's Thursday from the glorification of Marian Tudor ideology to the 'new born monster' of modern design is an image of the corruption of moral and aesthetic institutions in England. Waugh satirizes Silenus's decorations at King's Thursday considering them as a kind of disorder embodied in the new design of the old house. On the other hand, the appearance of the octopus, though it is brief but symbolically, signifies disorder. ''…and he [Potts] called attention to the tank of octopuses which was so prominent a feature of the room in which they were standing."(DF 142). Most critics agree that the captive octopus usually is used, in literature, as a symbol of disorder and destructive energy. In fact, due to the uncontrolled urban development of the early twentieth century in Europe in general and in London in particular, artists start to use the image of octopus to describe the urban sprawl of the new town planners .Waugh imagined the new decoration and designs of the buildings in London as an octopus spread there in a disorderly way.

Waugh considers, King's Thursday as a symbol of the lost English beauty. "Professor Franks, who was here last week, said it was recognized as the finest piece of domestic Tudor in England," (116). That is why Waugh considers the reconstruction of King's Thursday as a kind of destruction for such past beauty. This destruction is also considered to be the final destruction of all the past, things become upside-down, in such a modern fallen world or a century of the Common Man who replaced himself in the place of the gentleman. This scene also can be considered as a kind of reaction against the destruction of the English country house. In other words, such historic buildings especially the houses which are described in accurate architectural details, are usually connected with the periods that suffer

102 from destruction and decay, Waugh tries to portray the decadence and immorality of the recent stages, where love is defeated, chaos and cruelty arises, and man denies the Lord and becomes faithless. Waugh's ideology is dominated by a nostalgia for the past, for a world of beauty; the world that has not been affected by the influence of modernity. A world of discipline, faith and a moral code, where there was clear distinction between ladies and gentlemen, and it was easy for anyone or for an outside observer to determine who was a gentleman and who was not. The hopeless comparison of new to old is the basis of Waugh's satire as long as a return to what he sees as English morality and hierarchy is impossible.

The second example, of the double standard, is the judgement of the judicial authorities in the case of Mrs. Margot Beste–Chetwynde who is the sole responsible for the illegal business of a chain of prostitution in South America. No body mentioned her name; during Paul's trail, the judge thinks that it is too bold and disrespectful to mention Margot's name "a lady of beauty, rank and stainless reputation." (DF 160). On the contrary the innocent, Paul, is considered guilty and sentenced for seven years; submitting to his fate and believing that:

…in fact, and should be, one law for her and another for himself…It was not simply that Margot had been very rich or that he had been in love with her. It was just that he saw the impossibility of Margot in prison….It was impossible to imprison the Margot who had committed the crime. (188)

Though Paul realizes that he has been sacrificed to keep Margot's name and reputation Waugh brings to light one moment of his conflict with himself, but he does not feel wronged. "…his action in going to

103 prison for her had been chivalrous, but senseless, since it protected her from the consequence of her own crimes." (Stopp, 1958: 68).

Through the sequence of the events one can note that Margot embodies the impossibility of negotiating morality, and the moral code that Paul inherits from "the dead weight of precept, inherited from generations of schoolmasters and divines." (DF 187) does not guide actions, but it beyond doubt determines consequences. Waugh brings out the theme of isolation and alienation as main characteristics of modern Man, and shows how Paul prefers to be alone in the prison, and how he makes a request for the prison's Governor to leave him in the solitary confinement in which he had happily habituated. "Very good, sir! And there's a petition from D.4.12. [Paul] He's finished his four week's solitary, and he wants to know if he can keep at it for another four'…. 'I find it so much more interesting, sir,' said Paul."(172). In fact, this new situation for Paul and his living alone helps him to reevaluate the morality of human beings which enables him for not being a naïf anymore.

This situation reflects how modern Man is afraid, hesitated, alienated and unsociable. Owing to the absence of safety in such a declined and fallen world, only in prison Paul finds protection where the absurdities of such a modern world cannot touch him. Waugh portrays Margot as an attractive, beautiful, wealthy widow to show how the rich people hide their decayed morality and illegal business behind their wealth which gives them a fake social status. She is "…an aristocrat whose respectability is founded on the income from an empire of brothels. Margot represents the deceptively attractive amorality of a modern, vulgar, and secularized world." (Meckier, 1979: 60-61).

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Such hasty and illegal behaviour reveals Margot's immorality and her bad intentions towards Paul. She wants only to seize his naivety in her dirty and illegal business. That is why, she leaves him at his first plight. Her offer to release Paul from prison, when she sent her son to tell Paul to choose either his freedom or wait until he has finished his sentence of seven years to marry her, proves that she is faithless and a very foxy woman. But the fact is that, she wants to marry Mr. Maltravers and the idea of this marriage was in her mind long before Paul's appearance; as she mentioned that while she was talking with Paul and her son Peter at the occasion of Paul's first visit to King's Thursday . She said:

I sometimes think of marrying old Maltravers; said Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde, 'Just to get my own back, only "Margot Maltravers" does sound a little too much, don't you think? And if they give him a peerage, he's bound to choose something quite awful…'(DF 133)

She is looking only after her personal interests and does not care for the others pain. That is why, after Paul went to prison, she preferred to marry Maltravers to seize his official position and his political influence to protect her prostitution rackets from the law. Waugh shows the fruit of Margot's marriage of convenience when her new husband helps Paul to get away from the prison through an arranged fake play of death:

A few days later Paul was summoned to the Governor's room. 'I have an order here from the Home Secretary granting leave for you to go into a private nursing-home for the removal of your appendix. You will tart under escort, in plain clothes, this morning. 'But, sir,' said Paul, 'I don't want to have my appendix removed. In fact, it was done years ago when I was still at school.' (DF 200)

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They take him to a nursing home, which is run by Dr. Fagan, there was no operation or any kind of surgery; the surgeon signs a fake death certificate for Paul who is going to get a new existence with a new identity. Such wrongdoings are criminal, ugly and dirty than the trade of Margot's White Slave traffic. It reflects the high level of corruption whether in morality or in authority which is so much spread in such a declined and valueless modern world.

Henceforth, to focus on the level of gap between order and anarchy, Waugh introduces the pessimistic German architect Otto Silenus who adopts a kind of philosophy about dividing people not according to their gender but according to their human nature as static and dynamic because spiritually they are different. Silenus says that "instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic. There's a real distinction there, though I can’t tell you how it comes. I think we’re probably two quite different species spiritually." (DF 209). According to Silenus, life is "like the big wheel at Luna Park." (208), About Silenus's image of comparing life to the Big Wheel at Luna Park, Patey argues that:

The image recalls Fortune and her wheel… It seems an apt emblem for the world of Decline and Fall, seemingly governed by chance, where reward is disconnected from desert, effects cannot be predicated from causes and undeserving gamblers always win. Characters in this world disappear and reappear as if by accident–as on the morning of his wedding to Margot, Paul refills his glass of brandy, offers a toast to Fortune, and is immediately arrested by the police. (Patey, 1998: 71)

Through the use of the metaphor of the Wheel, Waugh also aims to differentiate between two main kinds of people in life; the

106 participants and the observers. The participants are embodied in the dynamic individuals while the observers are embodied in the life of the static individuals. Using this metaphor Waugh wants to demonstrate that in life everyone must find his own place. The people who participate in life can be considered as those who are challenging it and testing their limits. They are always in risk and facing difficulties. They are rowing to where they want to go not where the ocean of life wants to take them. While the static individuals are spectators of the human scene rather than participate in its activity. They live on the margin of life; they do not dare to deal with the mysteries of life. They see everything in life, but they see without fully comprehending. They are only skimming the surface of life.

Paul's peaceful sleep reflects a clearness of conscience and reminds us of Otto Silenus’s confession to Paul that it is difficult for him to sleep for over a year. Silenus mentioned that Margot cannot sleep unless she takes drugs to do so. Captain Grimes, Mr. Prendergast and Philbrick all cannot sleep easily and they confess of guilt that keeps them awake. "What do you take to make you sleep? I sleep quite easily, said Paul, except on trains.' You're lucky. Margot takes veronal. I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early, said Professor Silenus." (127).

At the end of the novel Paul recognizes his different nature when he was talking with Peter "You know, Paul, I think it was a mistake you ever got mixed up with us; don't you? We are different somehow. Don’t quite know how. Don’t think that's rude, do you Paul? No, I know exactly what you mean. You are dynamic, and I'm static." (DF 215). This conversation refers to the metaphor of the big wheel. Paul Pennyfeather is told that "life need not to be defined as motion on an

107 amusement park wheel, that he has been thrown of that wheel because he is "static" rather than "dynamic" and that in effect it is all right to immure himself in Anglican orthodoxy." (Davis, 1989: 6) However, his return to Oxford is to hide himself and avoid being in a direct contact with the issues of contemporary life. "Like Waugh, Paul has discovered that the world is shocking, arbitrary, and vastly unjust place-but vastly amusing, too, if one can stay out of its jaws." (Wykes, 1999: 60). It is a kind of retreat from a dynamic world which is not suitable for him, Davis also observes that:

Paul retreats into the shelter provided by Oxford and by the study of theology, he assumes an identity which he could not find in the outer, dynamic world. Paul's retreat is not so much a rejection of that world, however, as a recognition that it is not for the likes of him. (Davis, 1989: 65 – 66)

Evelyn Waugh depicts in this novel the transformation of the hero when he accepts to fabricate his own death and comes out with an alternate identity. He comes out of the prison and, he wants to educate himself, joins the College he was studying before "Yes, I’m going back to Oxford again to learn theology." (DF 208). Hence, the novel comes full circle as Paul returns to his College in Oxford to resume his theological studies. Now he is changed into Pennyfeather, a distant cousin to Paul Pennyfeather with a heavy cavalry.

Like Waugh, the protagonist of Decline and Fall belonged to the 'younger generation' that came of age in the post-war period. In 1930 Richard Aldington reflected upon the difficult position inhabited by this cohort:

"schoolboys were growing up under the apparently certain menace that they, too, would be roped in for the slaughter […] And then it was all cancelled. We, at least, had seen

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something, been something, done something. But they couldn't do anything or be anything. They were ushered into life during one of the meanest and most fraudulent decades staining the annals of history" (Stannard, 2002: 102-5, 103).

In this novel, Waugh implies that the post-war socialites are wandering aimlessly and unable to achieve an alternative way, and that they eventually will become trapped within their disintegrating and unrewarding lifestyle. He represents the repetitive and futile nature of society by depicting it as wandering in cyclical vortex; indeed, a character in Decline and Fall tellingly refers to the wandering modern society in a circle as a form of ''social vortex'' (DF 109). Lewis makes a corresponding argument in his short essay 'Inferior Religion' (1917), as he proposes that people inhabit cyclical routines which come to control their behaviour: "a man is made drunk with his boat or restaurant as he is a merry-go-round: only it is the staid, everyday drunkenness of the normal real, not easy always to detect" (Lewis, 2004: 149-55). Lewis argues that due to "the complexity of the rhythmic scene, the routines pass as open and untrammeled life and mask the reality that we have in most lives the scene of a pattern as constricted and complete as a theorem of Euclid"

(149-55) (Euclid is a Greek mathematician, father of Euclidean geometry). When Lewis outlines the mechanism behind an inferior religion, he refers to themes of individual disempowerment and of subordination to a greater system. He likens the social mechanism to that of the 'wheel at Carisbrooke' which 'imposes a set of movements' upon a donkey inside it (149-55). Initially, the donkey has to power the wheel by pushing it forward, but the creature is soon entrapped within the cyclical motion and is eventually pushed around by the

109 dynamics of the wheel itself. The donkey's conduct shares parallels with Waugh's socialites, as they initially desire to wander from party to party but they soon become caught up within the social cycle and are unable to break away from it, indeed, that is the wandering modern World.

At one point in Decline and Fall, the narrator reflects upon the character of Paul: "the whole of this book is an account of the mysterious disappearance of Paul Pennyfeather, so 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" (DF 160). Paul's disintegration is caused by his entry into the modern social scene, as he becomes involved in Margot Beste-Chetwynde's hectic social life. while observing Margot's friends at a party Paul realizes that they lack any sense of individuality, as they copy each other to such an extent that he cannot tell them apart:

Paul never learned all their names, nor was he ever sure how many of them there were. He supposed about eight or nine, but as they all wore so many different clothes of identically the same kind, and spoke in the same voice, and appeared so irregularly at meals, there may have been several more or several less' (DF 168).

Paul's individuality is ambiguous. He is a passive and naïve character who is wandering from scene to scene, without any sense of direction or choice, and at the end of the novel he even assumes an altogether different identity.

There is, perhaps, an implicit religious significance behind Waugh's use of 'wheel' imagery in his novels. T. S. Eliot makes use of such imagery in his religious poems 'Ash-Wednesday' (1930) and 'Burnt Norton' (1936). In the former poem, Eliot depicts a mind

110 turning in religious indecision before describing how the world exists in a state of detachment from religious meaning: "Against the Word the instilled world still whirled / About the centre of the silent Word" (Eliot, 1969: 96). In 'Burnt Norton', the spinning imagery is repeated and expended upon:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh not fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered (Eliot, 173).

Silenus's reference to socialites aiming to reach the 'still point', or, as he terms it, "the point completely at rest" (DF 277), can be read in line with this Eliotian idea of seeking religious meaning. Taking into consideration the religious symbolism that could be present within the wheel and cycle imagery, Waugh's socialites can be viewed as unconsciously searching for places of religious permanence within their wandering circuit in irreligious lifestyles.

There is textual evidence which indicates that the religions and boundaries ignored by the socialites in Decline and Fall are in part religious in nature, and that Waugh reveals the detrimental consequences of choosing to disregard them. Decline and Fall is populated by characters who relate ineffectively to religious principles. A main example is when an imprisoned religious Lunatic admits: "I keep reading the Bible. There's a lot of killing in that" (DF 237). The Lunatic ends up beheading a character named Prendergast, who worked in the prison as a "Modern Churchman", which means that he drew 'the salary of a beneficed clergyman, without having to "commit himself to any religious belief" (DF 185). Prendergast admits that he was unable to commit wholly to a particular faith because he

111 had "Doubts" (DF 43) which came from the fact that he could not understand "why God had made the world at all" (DF 36). Prendergast's bloody demise suggests Waugh's disdain for Modern churchmen and their lack of religious dedication.

4.1 A Gothic Man at the Hands of Savages

In A Handful of Dust Waugh added another sort of barbarians at home and the civilized man's trouble among them. Jonathan Greenberg remarks that Waugh's use of barbarism is "like Conrad in Heart of Darkness…uses the barbarism of the wilderness to comment ironically on the savagery of civilization." (Greenberg, 2003: 363). The symbols and meaning in A Handful of Dust has not been much explored by any of the critics, therefore a symbolic study of British society, industrial savagery, and plight of humanism seems relevant and virginal for the research. Hence, this is a modest attempt to study in the same:

• Symbols depicting the marital right within Tony Last's soul. Tony as a loving husband - is a symbol of dying value system of the rotten age.

• Brenda as a menace of modern women syndrome.

• Mrs. Rattery, Mrs. Northcote, Mrs. Beaver, Princess Jenny Abdul Akbar as women represent break family and ruin relationship.

• Jenny Abdul Akbar is a symbol of the neurasthenic modern wife – a symbol of Cleopatra, Dido and Philomela.

• Perfumes [that] drowned in a scent of odor represent Jenny's heavy odorous musk. (HD 85-87-89) She is a "lady of the rock" with her womb "out of place…" (90) Jenny's scars recall Eliot's reference to the rape of Philomela by Tereus: "…she's got the most terrible scars." (92)

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• With bed-rooms at Hetton and the quest motif for the city is symbolic of birth-death and rebirth motif.

• Tony's quest for the city with Dr. Messinger is his quest for the city as a Gothic citadel. Tony's vision of two cities is this radiant sanctuary. (205)

• The city is a place of rebirth of Tony. He is trapped in a place of neither death nor life but is thinking of both. There are no knights to restore him to his health or any gothic sanctuary to take refuge but only destruction.

• The Hetton myth; Helton is a false sanctuary. It is based on an aesthetic lie. The original Hetton was rebuilt in 1864 by Tony's grandfather in Gothic style from the destruction of a genuine monastery. The chromium plating and sheepskin carpet is a symbolic parallel of barbaric linking two places as in Conrad's Heart of Darkness: What happens on the Thames happens on the Congo also. This is reinforced by the comment, "The sea and the sky were welded together without a joint." (Heart of Darkness, 2). The chromium plating and sheepskin carpet also symbolize inhuman mechanization and primitive barbarity. It is also symbolic of the return of savagery in the guise of modernity. Hetton is a symbol of static condition as there is no change at the end of the novel. There are no suggestions of 'Shantih' as in The Waste Land.

• Brenda and Beaver are the symbols of degraded age. Symbols depicting unhappy relationship between Tony and Brenda emanate out of Tony's desire to remodify the ancestral structure to which Brenda has strong objection. His shallow objections collapse as he is a symbol of dying value system of the rotten decadent age. He himself is not deeply religious. He follows a monotonous ritual of ceremonious

113 behaviour. It is symbolized by the sermon read by Hetton's priest: "Instead of the placid ox and ass of Bethlehem,’... ‘we have for companions the ravening tiger and the exotic camel, the furtive jackal and the ponderous elephant..." (HD 61).

Superficially, the sermon appears as unintentional and meaningless act. The symbolic implication of this ignorant is that the vicar's words import neither unthinking nor meaningless words, but are parallel to the sermon written for soldiers on the battlefield. It is a prefigurative symbol predicting that Hetton is not an impregnable bastion of humanity in the decadent world but it is a house defenseless against the ravening tiger. The ravening tiger and the exotic camel are symbolized by Mrs. Beaver, whose rapaciousness exceeds that of any jungle beast. Significantly she arrives at Hetton by train, at Brenda's invitation, soon after Christmas, to renovate the morning room and modernize it. Mrs. Beaver directly and without any hesitation, criticizes her host’s residence, describing it as a horrible room, and starts to plan how she can renovate and redesign it though there are difficulties because of its ancestral style and the objection of Tony. She decides that Hetton can only be made heritable by covering walls with white chromium plating and laying natural sheepskin carpets.

I know exactly what Brenda wants, said Mrs. Beaver more moderately. I don’t think it will be impossible. I must think about it…the structure does rather limit one…you know I think the only thing to do would be to disregard it altogether and find some treatment so definite that it carried the room, if you see what I mean… supposing we covered the walls with white chromium plating and had natural sheepskin carpet… ‘I’d blow the whole thing sky- high,’…Tony left them to their discussion. (HD 81-82)

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Mrs. Brenda's assault on Tony also symbolizes her intention to redecorate the interior of Hetton with walls of white chromium. It is a symbol of her digging of Tony's grave before he is dead. The ravening tiger and exotic camel are symbolic of Mrs. Beaver as already stated above. Tony Last is a loving husband of Brenda. He wants to live like a Victorian, self-assured Christian gentleman. His self-assured individuality is part of a continuous heritage extending from the past into the future. His ancestral home is symbolic of his allegiance to the past tradition. His desire is to be rooted in Hetton. He says: "I don't happen to go anywhere else except Hetton" (HD 51). It is symbolic of his monogamous mind to remain life-long faithful to a single woman. His mind is obsessed with things of his life. It is symbolized by his desire never to remove his boyhood toys from his bedroom. Similarly once his heart is captured by Brenda, he remains her captive forever: "... had got into the habit of loving and trusting Brenda." (126). Thus, Tony gets her pity but not our sympathy. We cannot pity the stupid wooden goodness of Tony. For instance, we see how Tony idolizes the past but in a childish way than a devotion to traditional values. Without awareness, he nominates the rooms, of his ancestral house, after the figures of the Arthurian legend, unaware of some of its symbolic meanings. For instance, he nominates his room ‘Morgan Le Fay’, while his wife's room ‘Guinevere’ which can be associated with Guinevere's betrayal of her husband King Arthur. And ironically Waugh resided John Beaver in Sir Galahad room when he visited Hetton. Therefore, John's accommodation in such a specific room makes his role associated with Lancelot's betrayal and adulterous sin.

Consequently, Beaver's affair with Brenda spoils Tony's romantic world in which he actually lives. Tony's ritual is that he goes

115 to church as a social gesture rather than as a heart-felt religious commitment. To focus more on the lack of faith in God, in such a fallen modern world, Waugh portrays Tony as the one who has little contact with the kind of spirituality which gives him strength. Waugh reveals that even Tony's regular Sunday morning Church ceremonies are not more than a weekly routine. It helps him keep up his sense of familial and national history; they are not more than an inherited obligation. Through such religious characteristics Tony is a symbol of the modern individual and the protagonist who, almost, feels tired and enters the church looking for a place to sit down or rest. These churchgoing scenes seem in one sense to display a process of secularization, since the protagonists of modern novels very seldom enter church to worship God. Therefore, such a religious custom, like Tony's, is not more than a worthless ritual to his role as country squire. That is why it has offered nothing to him at times of crisis such as the death of his son. Malcolm Bradbury remarks that:

The Church is, for Waugh, concerned with fact; it is a citadel of reason, clarity and beauty, but it must cope with what lies outside-anarchy, social decline, poor workmanship, and the uncreating word. Waugh’s historical view of Catholicism mean, of course, that it is necessarily identified with a failing social order; his rational view of it means that it is permanently threatened by anarchy….Catholicism is not big enough to contain the world; the spiritual life is separated from the real life. (Bradbury, 1964, 13)

It is a world, as Eliot and Waugh see it, in the inter-war period, a disintegrated, immoral, and devoid of any faith or any social principles. In such a purely faithless world, God has been thrown away, at that time when faith for Waugh was the axis force of an

116 ordered and civilized life. For instance, when we see how Tony refuses the vicar’s religious role angrily and insisted to be not more than a social one. He criticizes the vicar's futile attempt to console him after the death of his son, John Andrew, he considered it as painfully unsuitable. Tony talks angrily with Mrs. Rattery and poured himself out whisky after he met the vicar who tried to ease him: "I only wanted to see him about arrangements. He tried to be comforting. It was painful… after all the last thing one wants to talk about at a time like this, is religion." (HD 116).

While logically and morally, the first thing to talk about, at a time like this, is religion. It is the time of the real need to be close to God and be protected by His mercy. Through that Tony's faithlessness becomes clearer. And now the fact becomes clear; what Tony does believe in is Hetton and nothing else. Patey remarks that "Hetton is as Frank Kermode says, Tony's ‘Church’, but its ‘type’ not of the Catholic but the modern Anglican city: of what T.S. Eliot called Victorian Liberal Protestantism…Modern Anglicanism." (Patey,1998: 199). He admits to Todd that he himself does not know whether he believed in God: "I suppose so. I’ve never really thought about it much.’ I have thought about it a great deal and still do not know…" (HD 213) For him his religious affair is a matter of political expedience. Hence, it is clear that Waugh wants to reconfirm again that the people of modern age are always trying to place humanity rather than God through idolizing human reason, neglecting the supernatural and rejecting the divine guidance; he believes that "The trouble about the world today is that there’s not enough religion in it. There’s nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment."(Alec Waugh, 2002: 191). Waugh has attacked

117 the Anglican Church, in his later years, he considered it a hollow belief system. He believes that the Anglican religion has become a habit, something that does not relate to the daily existence of the English people. That is why a pessimistic view has been portrayed of a society that is valueless and corrupted because it has repressed religion.

In fact, as many major modern novelists believe in this idea like Henry James, Franz Kafka, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf some poets also adopted religious views or link their work clearly with the problem of religious experience like Eliot, Philip Larkin and Wallace Stevens. For instance, Wallace Stevens wrote in the late of 1940s, "It is a habit of mind with me to be thinking of some substitute for religion....My trouble, and the trouble of a great many people, is the loss of belief in the sort of God in Whom we were all brought up to believe." (Kermode, 1993: 66).

The other example of using juxtaposition and coincidence to ruin the difference between civilization and wildness is portrayed at the beginning of this novel but its counterpart is mentioned at the end of the text. Shortly after the novel begins, Brenda appears at her dressing table with her son’s nanny while she is applying cosmetics to her face, she "… Spat in the eye black." (HD 24). It is an uncivilized act of a woman like Brenda's type. It is completely associated with scene of spitting for the root of Cassari by the Indian women which appears during Tony's journey in the Brazilian jungle. "Cassiri [which is made from sweet roots] ‘the local drink made of fermented cassava’….The women chew the root up and spit it into a hollow tree trunk." (HD 176).

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Henceforth, through such a reference of spitting Waugh wants to disintegrate the thin gap between the civilized of the modern age and the savages. Waugh also tries to refute the false show of the European civilization in comparison with savagism, not only in the European societies but in ourselves as well. Waugh mocks the rich and the first class of the English people embodied in the character of Brenda who is supposed to be a civilized and elegant lady. Through her spitting and the immoral behaviour; she proves that she is a woman of immoral and savage behaviour. Supporting this point of view, George McCartney remarks that:

Despite her refined personal appearance, Brenda is a woman who litters, spits, and seduces shamelessly in plain view of others… an essential vulgarity that allows her to become a careless, utterly self-centered seductress calmly betraying her husband to take up with a man who possesses no other interest for her availability at the moment she desires some excitement outside her marriage. (McCartney, 2004: 140)

Hence, through such a hierarchal system of heirship, in addition to the nomination of one of Tony's heir as Teddy Last; the name which Jenny Akbar used in the first part of the novel to coddle Tony, one can feel that such illusion gives a sense that Tony is reborn again and the cycle of his devotion to Hetton will be repeated but in different degraded way. Teddy Last, a young man of twenty-two, contrary to Tony, starts breeding silver foxes to increase the estate income. This indicates that the values of English Gothic life are being reduced to a state of even greater decadence than at the beginning of the novel. It also proves that in modern life, people, like Mrs. Beaver, are ready to deal with anything to get money even if it is against their beliefs and

119 values. Therefore, it is quite obvious that Hetton, as a tangible symbol of English Gothic life, will fall to ruin due to such a world governed by commercial and disorderly codes.

The silver foxes ran up to the doors when they saw Teddy come with the rabbits. The vixen who had lost her brush seemed little the worse for her accident. Teddy surveyed his charges with pride and affection. It was by means of them that he hoped one day to restore Hetton to the glory that it had enjoyed in the days of his cousin Tony. (HD 228)

Consequently, one can feel that there is a repetition of imprisonment through the scene of encaging foxes in Hetton's farm by modern devices. Such a scene, typically, can be associated with the encaged prisoner, Tony, at the hand of a crazy man, where he is torn from the ideal, timeless world of Hetton, to a living death in the Brazilian jungle. "The silver-fox farm was behind the stables; along double row of wire cages; they had wire floors covered with earth and cinders to prevent the animals digging their way out." (228).

Accordingly, we see how Waugh tries to portray a system of values, ironically it reflects a dark and gloomy vision about the moral decay of the English society, in which we can see darker portrait than in Eliot's The Waste Land; a world without any human values or any religious fundamentals. Hence, portraying Tony Last as the last of his kind, in such emotionally crippled environment and the deterioration of the upper-class marriage, is to symbolize the death of the last Empire of the English society. Here one can remember Waugh’s impact and bitterness of his first wife’s infidelity, with John Heygate, which was a turning point in Waugh’s personal and literary life; and much reflected in his writings, whether in this novel or in the others.

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Brenda is an example of modern women - syndrome. Brenda finds both home and husband terribly dull and has an affair with a totally uninteresting man called John Beaver. Thus both become a symbol of domestic destruction. There is nothing to appreciate about either his mother or himself: His mummy and he are nasty, parasitical and unbearably dull. Not only Beaver is dull but he is a villain also. He is a symbol of total evil. His consummate viciousness gets added colour of cruelty in the moribund modern society. He lives by sucking blood of the innocents who live around him. When Brenda praises Beaver before Tony by saying: "… he isn't so bad." (HD 37), Tony warns her to be cautious about him: "you're being heroic with Beaver... He's not like me." (37). Her detestation for Tony and Hetton is like Eve's dissatisfaction for fruits of Eden except the apple. As Adam warns of Satan's infatuation for Eve and the forbidden apple, Tony also warns her that "You’re mad about him." (39). As Eve is bewitched by Satan's enticing words she admits that he is as cold as fish, but "I happen to have a fancy for him." (52).

Brenda and Beaver’s physical proximity is couched in terms of physical union as that of Satan making her admit to the eternal "fall" of humanity as God threw them "head long" on earth: "When he had kissed her, she rubbed against his cheek in the way she had." (49). As in most of his works, Waugh portrays the rootlessness and shallowness of modern people who concentrate, only, on present sensualism and the moment they are in. Brenda Last in this novel is one of the clearest examples of such people. She is portrayed as the one who has been left with egoism; she has savagely decided that nothing could stand against the way of her desire, even the death of her son. She is like Captain Grimes in Decline and Fall whose only principle is to live in the

121 moment, unchecked by social conventions. Philosophically, it seems Waugh is preoccupied with what he considers to be the wide growth of primitivism, even at home, where the individual starts to behave uncivilized as if there were no morals, no social rules. For instance, when Brenda felt a little bored with her marriage directly she acquired a lover, in the same way she might choose a new dress, with no objection even from her mother. Therefore, Waugh wants to show, that this type of illegal behaviour becomes normal in such a modern society, for instance:

Brenda's illegal affair with John Beaver has been judged by friends and family only in social terms, not moral or religious principles. They consider what she does is not more than an ‘adventure’; she has ‘disgraced herself’ not by committing adultery, but by doing so with a socially unsuitable partner. Adding to this even Brenda's mother tries to justify her daughter's affairs with Beaver by saying that "Brenda must have felt a tiny bit neglected- people often do at that stage of marriage. I have known countless cases -and it was naturally flattering to find a young man to beg and carry for her. That’s all it was, nothing wrong." (HD 130).

Consequently Stannard remarks that A Handful of Dust is "a book which rages against betrayals of trust and qualitative value but its society has long since decayed beyond the point where any sensible attachment to these ideals is (or was ever) possible in secular terms." (Stannard, 1986: 381) Hereafter, it seems that infidelity has almost become familiar in such a modern and decaying world though it is one of the most dangerous social diseases; but unfortunately, people fall in love by imitating each other, whether it is wrong or right. For instance, through his conversation with Tony, Allan: Marjorie’s husband;

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Brenda's brother in law, hardly tries to convince Tony to be patient with Brenda, because she will be fed up with Beaver and she will come back to him, like what Marjorie, Brenda’s sister, did last year he said "…last year Marjorie was going everywhere with that ass Robin Beaseley. She was mad about him at the time, but I pretend not to notice and it all blew over. If I were you I should refuse to recognize that anything has happened." (HD 129).

Accordingly, through such examples Waugh reveals that such betrayals of wives become common in such a faithless and fallen modern world. It becomes one of the fashions in London society. Therefore, as it seems, Brenda is motivated only by an externally imposed need to keep up with her fashionable affection. She simply does not want to be left by her friends and generation. She wants to be like the others, living independently in a small apartment, having immoral relationship, divorcing and remarrying. In fact, what Brenda and her friends do are exactly what a lot of people are doing now. It is the danger that faces all the societies nowadays. It is the danger of an inability to distinguish between good and bad. Waugh always tries to say that is happened because the modern age becomes faithless where faith, anyway, is displaced by hedonism. In this context McCartney accurately comments that:

A bit bored with her marriage, she acquires a lover in much the same way she might choose a new dress, not for its distinctive design but its ready serviceableness. Having done so, she then cajoles her culpably innocent husband into letting her rent one of Mrs. Beaver’s Chromium-plated bed-sitting rooms in the city on the pretext of needing a place to stay while taking a course in economics. The flat enables her to conduct her liaison with relative ease and it

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soon becomes the center of her life. (McCartney, 2004: 150-151)

This indicates Brenda's fall from Hetton into hell. After the fall, all human beings ‘lose their inner being’ their complexity and their intellectual independence. Being a leisured class of people whose enjoyment start after nine in the evening and last till four in the morning, they were greatly preoccupied with love. They regarded love as a personal reaction and marriage was looked upon as a social convention. Thus passion and affection were separated from the couples. Complication arises out of Brenda's butterfly attitude to shift her passion from Tony to Beaver after the death of her only son. The adulterous bond between Brenda and Beaver ends up in her shifting her allegiance to Jock Grant - Menzies. Fake courtship is the order of the day in which Mrs. Rattery, Mrs. Northcote, Jenny Abdul Akbar are trying to jump in at the first opportunity.

Women mentioned above in A Handful of Dust are just like, Albert and Lil, of the ‘Game of Chess’ in The Waste Land. Lil's husband has given her money to buy dentures to appear presentable since he is coming home after four years. But instead of buying the dentures, she has used that money for abortion. The same happened with Tony when he rents a flat, in London, for his wife, and gave her money to study economics, as she alleges, but what happened is Brenda started to meet her boyfriend in the flat and spend on him.

Mrs. Rattery is another modern woman of Lil's type without any recognizable emotional depth. She is at once an emblem and an example symbolizing the crux of the modern age. Her cool and unaffected modernity is very much of a piece with the dandyish. No one belongs to her, nor does she have any concern with others.

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Nothing affects her. She is a woman of many with outs. She is without background, totally denationalized, rich without wealth. Rattery is able to achieve name and fame with her remarkable presence. She is symbolic of a flirt who changes "her hotel" on an average "once every three weeks." (HD 99). Her bed sheets symbolize her acts of free love as represented by Lil's activity during her husband's absence: "They are functional without ornament." (99). And her functional activity on the bed is sexual satisfaction without any need for a husband. Even she does not have one for name's sake i.e. ‘ornamental’. One wonders whether they symbolize love? She is addicted to bouts of morphine. Her greatest virtue is that she is bored and rootless. She is ceaselessly sensational and seeks rhythm in her life with drugs.

While Tony Last leaves his heritage of Hetton to join expedition, Mrs. Rattery is least concerned with the heritage. She is neither bothered about the past or the present nor about her two sons. She talks about them as someone she has met in her life or as one would do about people hardly remembered: "I don't see them often. They’re at school somewhere. I took them to the cinema last summer. They’re getting quite big. One's going to be good looking, I think. His father is." (116). Her qualities define her as much as Brenda's. Both of them are apparently hidden but shamelessly naked. Their activities reflect like a shallow stream. She is a mixture of machine and animal vitality with no private self or any inner self. Because of this she is a modern woman with no emotions touching her. This emotional-less being plays a game of cards with Tony when he is totally nervous as a result of the death of his son. She enjoys her game's brief consolation even as she yields to its ultimate triviality. Her ultimate message is to accept the unavoidable. She provides Tony with amusement card

125 games, as the only condolence that works to him at the time of absence of faith:

Mrs. Rattery sat intent over her game, moving little groups of cards adroitly backwards and forwards about the table like shuttles across a loom; under her finger out of chaos; she established sequence and precedence; the symbols before her became coherent; interrelated. (HD 111) She persuaded him to play a children’s game which is the only game he knows: "I am a dog, you're a hen."(113).

Brenda and Mrs. Rattery are symbolic of animality. Accordingly, there is no comparison or similarity between Tony's Victorian world and Mrs. Rattery's secular modern world. Each one of them represents different period of time. For that reason, Tony cannot understand her. She is almost like Brenda; she lives the life Brenda longs to, and she evokes Brenda’s shallowness. She comes to Hetton by aeroplane, "She arrived by air on Monday afternoon. It was the first time that a guest had come in this fashion and the household was appreciably excited." (99). She breaks the peculiar Victorian atmosphere of Hetton. She is like the goddess she is meant to be, she comes down from the sky as if she were bringing with her the twentieth-century unsettledness which will trouble Tony's Victorian dream. For instance, Tony’s belief of unmarried sexual activity is sinful, while for Mrs. Rattery, it is like any other business which is to be managed effectively and practically. In other words, in Mrs. Rattery’s life, there is no private or inner self between what she thinks and what she does. She also does not hide her happiness, while she is staying at Hetton, when she finds that Brenda has decided to do some interior decoration to modernize the morning room, Mrs. Rattery does

126 not hesitate to participate and help the workmen to remove the traditional final touches.

In fact, Mrs. Rattery is made to represent the modern mechanical human nature which effectively participates in the destruction of Tony’s traditional values. About her McCartney remarks:

Mrs. Rattery is the complete twentieth-century woman…. She is without background…she is the ultimate twentieth- century transient....Like Margot Metroland in Decline and Fall, Julia Stitch in Scoop, and Virginia Crouchback in the Sword of Honour trilogy, Mrs. Rattery is one of Waugh’s goddesses of modernity.…she has dispatched the nostalgic accessories of the past and abandoned the needless bother of an interior life as if it were so much excess baggage.…Mrs. Rattery’s existence is radically present tense. With no background and no interior, she is ideally suited to modern life. (McCartney, 2004: 84)

It is said if people start believing in astrology, and prediction of future by using cards and other modes of superstition, they lose their peace of mind. In this novel, Waugh makes clear the reflection of lack of faith and the absence of the religious spirituality. He satirizes the English society when he depicts its women who pay five guineas each to have their fortune told from the soles of their feet instead of from the palms of their hands. "...a new fortune-teller called Mrs. Northcote. Mrs Beaver had discovered her and took a commission of two pounds….She told fortunes in a new way, by reading the soles of the feet." (HD 117). Mrs. Northcote is a modern Sosotris predicting the future of Brenda by looking at her sole. It is a tragic hour for her, as her son is killed during the horse ride while she is enjoying her time in London with some of her friends: "Brenda sat down and took off her

127 shoe and stocking, Mrs. Northcote laid the foot on her knee and gazed at it great solemnity; then she picked it up and began tracing the small creases of the sole with the point of silver pen case." (HD 117). Her prediction is false as the one in The Waste Land. She is a Sosotris of the 1930's. Like a dog is in search of a bitch, her prediction for Brenda is merely sexual fulfillment in her search for her lovers: "One is loyal and tender, but he has not disclosed his love, one passionate and overpowering you, he is steely hearted and rapacious... I bet that's Beaver, Bless him." (118). Brenda is a despicable social butterfly as she feels relieved that it is not her lover but her son who is dead. One of Brenda’s immoral, sad and funny situations is when she confuses her dead son’s name with her lover’s John Beaver, only after Jock explains her further she realizes her shameful mistake:

‘What is it, Jock? Tell me quickly, I’m scared. It’s nothing awful, is it?’ I’m afraid it is. There’s been a very serious accident.’ ‘John?’ ‘Yes’ ‘Dead?’ He nodded. She sat down on a hard little Empire chair against the wall, perfectly still with her hands folded in her lap, like a small well-brought- up child introduced into a room full of grown-ups. She said, ‘Tell me what happened. Why do you know about it first? ‘I’ve been down at Hetton since the weekend.’ ‘Hetton?’ ‘Don’t you remember? John was going hunting today.’ She frowned, not at once taking in what he was saying. ‘John…John Andrew…I… Oh thank God…’ Then she burst into tears…. ‘When you first told me’, she said, ‘I didn’t understand’. (118- 120)

Brenda’s response to the death of her only son unveils her real personality not only as a betrayer wife but also as an emotionless mother. In such a tragic and critical situation Waugh shows her in a position that she cannot get any sympathy from the readers till the end

128 of the novel; when Jock tells her of the ‘very serious accident’ that ‘John’ has died, she imagines with a shock that her lover, John Beaver, who might have met with that accident on his flight to Paris. And when Jock explains that he himself has been hunting at Hetton does she slowly awaken to the knowledge that her son is the one who died and not her lover John. She speaks a few words that deprive her of any sense of motherhood and betray her when she thanks God for her mistake: ‘John…John Andrew…I…Oh thank God’. (HD 119).

Most critics criticize Brenda’s reaction to the news of her son’s death, accusing her of being devoid of any motherhood feelings, Peter Quennell observes that:

To Brenda, her cicisbeo is ‘my Mr. Beaver’, ‘poor Mr. Beaver’; and yet when the news is broken to her of the little boy’s death she experiences an immense relief when she understands that it is her son-John Andrew-and not her lover-plain John-who has been killed. (Quennell, 1934: 155-156)

To reflect more marital deterioration in the English society Waugh portrays how Brenda plans to use her Arabic Princess friend Jenny Abdul Akbar to seduce Tony. It is another remarkable of a familial degradation when the wife, instead of preserving and protecting the chastity of the husband, she herself plans to destroy it; to throw him in the well of sin she has already drown in. "We must get him interested in a girl.’ ‘Brenda said,’ ‘If only we could… Who is there?’ ‘There’s always old Sybil." (HD 84) who possibly is an allusion to the Cumean Sybil referred to in the epigraph of Eliot’s Waste Land "by which Brenda thinks to heal her remnant of a conscience, capping infidelity with infidelity" (Stopp 92). For this reason, Jenny Abdul Akbar is symbolized by the exotic camel and

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Brenda hopes that Tony will have an affair to keep him busy. This plan spells his total destruction and reveals the depth of the wife’s degradation of planning a bed-mate for her husband.

Though Jenny is fantastic with her distinguished appearance, full of emotions, loaded with stories of great suffering of a mysterious past which can be considered the personification of the old Arabian Nights, but she could not seduce Tony as Brenda had expected. Instead Tony regarded her as a "Joke-woman" (HD 91) and "hated her like Hell" (95). Though she tried to attract his attention through calling him Teddy, but unconsciously, instead, she fascinates Tony’s son, John Andrew, by her beauty, perfume and tales of Moorish horsemen.

When Tony is informed that Brenda wishes him to sell Hetton, directly he imagines that she wants him to buy Beaver for her (152). Hence, such scenes of conflict bring chaos to Tony’s world which is parallel to the forces of disorder in the form of Mrs. Beaver’s workmen who invaded Hetton’s safety to introduce chromium plating into the morning room. As in Decline and Fall, when the Tudor Gothic of King’s Thursday was savagely modernized into ‘something clean and square’ by Professor Silenus, accordingly, Tony’s illusion of getting ‘into the habit of loving and trusting Brenda’ has gone now, especially when he makes sure that Brenda insists to get divorce and he has to sell Hetton. Now he admits that everything central in his life has drown in an endless chaos. He finds himself rootless in a society that no longer believes in traditional morality. He is shocked into a brief moment of clarity:

A whole Gothic world had come to grief… there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled…‘I’ve decided exactly what’s

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going to happen.’ ‘Brenda is not going to get her divorce. I am going away for six months or so. When I come back, if she wishes it, I shall divorce Brenda without settlements of any kind. Is that clear?’ (HD 153)

Tony has moved from illusory security to chaos, a habit of love changes to devastating emptiness. Tony ceases to exist without illusion. He wanders in search of his lost city. He is an antiexplorer as he is trying to escape the unknown. His guide Mr. Messinger has told him that the city is to be found in Brazilian jungles and is called by the natives: ‘Aromatic Jam’ (HD 164). Tony knows what it will look like... ‘blossom’ (164).

This totality of acts brings out the antithesis between the slick modern world of London society and Tony who idealizes and gives preferential treatment to the past in comparison to present. Thus he has reverence for Hetton. Tony's maintenance of Hetton and its interior is an individual attempt to reconnect with history that is lost forever - an "emotional pain that Tony cannot articulate that emerges in his personal feelings of nostalgia rather than in speech or actions." (Gorra, 1988: 211).

Tony can keep Hetton only by sacrificing his idealized conception of it. He can preserve either his home or the refuge with his wife, but not both. Finally he decides to divorce "Brenda without settlements of any kind." (HD 153) He believes that Hetton's accession to modernity is his betrayal to Hetton. Therefore, he decides to travel and wander in searching for a relief. He seeks a journey to find his own existence. Thus his exploration is a symbol of his self-discovery. It is his plan to save Hetton. His expedition is symbolic of his search for a mythical city.

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Accordingly one can say that Waugh portrays the hero of this novel as if he were born to be betrayed, first at the hands of his wife and her lover Mr. Beaver then at the hand of Mr. Todd where he passes the rest of his life as a slave, who used to read aloud to Brenda and John Andrew until he made them feel pain and boring in Hetton:

He had always rather enjoyed reading aloud and in the first year of marriage had shared several books in this way with Brenda, until one day, in a moment of frankness, she remarked that it was torture to her. He had read to John Andrew, late in the afternoon, in winter, while the child sat before the nursery fender eating his supper. But Mr. Todd was a unique audience. (HD 214)

Consequently, one can conclude that Tony’s amusement, in the first year of marriage, in reading aloud to Brenda until she feels boring is a foreshadowing of his later pain in having to be forced to spend his days repetitively rereading the works of Dickens to a delighted, sadistic madman. Therefore, his attempt to escape the difficult times of the twentieth century, in which he found himself trapped in, by retreating to a pleasant fantasy of what the Victorian life was supposed to be, pushed Tony unfortunately, to find himself lifted out of history. He is trapped in the Brazilian jungle, where he belongs neither to the Victorian era nor to the modern England; he leaves one type of barbarism behind only to find himself trapped in another one, and from one sort of slavery to another. His fate is circulating in a repetitive circle of Dickensian fictions that ridicule the fantastic world he had tried unsuccessfully to create for himself at Hetton Abbey. At the end he discovers that he had been living in a dream of historical destiny where there is no history for him any longer. He becomes as Littlewood claims, like the others especially when. "…all his

132 romanticism gone, a savage now among savages, Tony has finally succeeded in learning the law of the jungle." (Littlewood,1983: 98).

But what happened to Tony and his friend, Dr. Messinger, can be considered as a kind of punishment; Waugh punished them because no doubt they plan to take what they can from an ancient city to which they had no rights. While other critics point out that Tony is punished because he lacks the ability to see the moral decay of the world he is living in, and his great crime, as far as Waugh is concerned, is that he believes in the romantic erroneous belief of Hetton.

We can conclude that In A Handful of Dust Waugh concentrates on conditions in England. He continues to focus on upper-class characters, as the protagonist Tony Last is a member of the landed gentry. From the beginning Tony is set apart from his socialite contemporaries. While he lies in bed "for ten minutes very happily planning the renovation of his ceiling", socialites throughout England are waking up "queasy and despondent" (HD 30). The repetitive sentences enforce Waugh's point that the social scene has not progressed in any way, and it is commendable that Tony wishes to dissociate himself from parties: "But I don't happen to want to go anywhere else except Hetton" (HD 214). Hetton Abbey is Tony's refuge from the modern World, and its Arthurian décor symbolizes its antiquated nature:

"the bedrooms with their brass bedsteads, each with a frieze of Gothic text, each named from Malory, Yseult, Elaine, Mordred and Marlin, Gawaine and Bedivere, Lancelot, Perceval, Tristram, Galahad, his own dressing-room, Morgan le Fay, and Brenda's Guinevere". (HD 28)

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Tony's dedication to his home is in contrast to his relationship with his Anglo-Catholic faith, which is habitual and superficial. It is implied that Tony's religious values are flawed from the start because Waugh presents them as Anglo-Catholic instead of Roman Catholic. As Tony J. Sutton suggests, Waugh believed that Tony's faith was the "inevitable offspring of the illegitimate and uninformed faith planted by Elizabeth"(Sutton, 2010: 143).

The narrator of A Handful of Dust explains that Tony's church- going forms "the simple, mildly ceremonious order of his Sunday morning", which "he adhered to with great satisfaction" (HD 51). His ritualistic form of attendance is reflected in his mechanical behaviour during the service: "he performed the familiar motions of sitting, standing, and leaning forward" (HD 53. Even when Tony is shown to pray – a time for reflection and communication with God – Waugh does not describe his character's internal thoughts, but instead indicates the shallowness of Tony's faith by depicting only his physical motions: "He leant forward for half a minute with his forehead on his hand" (HD 53). The reader is also informed that Tony's church-going routine had "evolved, more or less spontaneously, from the more severe practices of his parents" (HD 51). It is Tony's sense of tradition, rather than his religious devotion, that leads him to church every week, as he wants to continue the routine that was set in place by his parents.

In his essay 'Converted to Rome: 'Why it Has Happened to Me', Waugh claimed that a significant consequence of Western secularism was a "lack of confidence in moral and social standards" (EAR 104). Christopher Dawson, Waugh's 'friend and admirer', made a similar point in 'The Modern Dilemma' (1932). Dawson states that the

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Christian tradition "lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism", and he argued that "if Europe abandons Christianity, it must also abandon its moral code"(Dawson, 1998: 118-31, 118,119). It is probable that Waugh was aware of Dawson's work, since he knew the letter well and, as Patey notes, "visited [him] in the thirties, stopping at Dawson's home in Yorkshire en route to Stoneyhurst" (in Lancashire) (Patey,1998: 121).

It is possible that a weakening of moral values is explored in A Handful of Dust through the character of Tony Last. Actually, Waugh implies in his portrayal of Tony that morality and civilized virtues can only survive if they are supported by religion. Tony represents decent social values (such as fairness towards one's tenants and family, as well as respect for tradition). His innate decency and his reference for past conventions are symbolized by Hetton, a place of old-fashioned décor and traditional routines. Thus, the vulnerable state of Tony's ideals is initially effected by the disintegrating condition of Hetton – "the ceiling of Morgan le Fay was not in perfect repair […] damp had penetrated into one corner, leaving a large patch where the gilt had tarnished and the colour flaked away" (HD 29). Hetton's decay is increased when Tony's socialite acquaintances begin to spend their most weekends in it. The socialites gradually alter the physical state of the building. They encourage its renovation – "I'd blow the whole thing sky-high" (HD 128) – and Tony is forced to watch with dismay as his wife, Brenda, starts ordering walls to be torn down and sections of the house to be blocked off. The redecoration and repair of the building undermines Humphrey Carpenter's view that "Hetton is the one thing in the novel that has proved permanent and indestructible"(Carpenter, 1998: 255).

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Waugh's point is that the decent values embodied within Hetton need to be actively protected because the house, and Tony's way of life, is corrupted by the modernity's destructive influence. Tony cannot fight back, and in this way he embodies Waugh's view that Western civilization does not have "the power of survival" (EAR 104) if it is unsupported by Christianity.

T. S. Eliot made a comparable point about Matthew Arnold's relationship to faith in Use of poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), in which he wrote: "like many people the vanishing of whose religious belief has left behind only habits, he placed an exaggerated emphasis on morals" (Eliot, 1986: 106). Soon after the death of their son, Brenda admits to being in love with another man (John Beaver) and she ends their seven-years marriage. It simply does not enter Tony's head that this could or would ever happen: "But it was several days before Tony fully realized what it meant. He had got into a habit of loving and trusting Brenda" (HD 196), Tony's habits not only define his daily routine, they also inform the way he thinks and feels.

Actually, Waugh suggests that Tony's morals and values are not strong enough to support him in this difficult time, as he is left totally confused and disappointed. Everything Tony had experienced or learned to expect, the whole reasonable and decent constitution of things, has vanished, leaving him wandering in a world suddenly bereft of order in which he is surrounded by an "all- encompassing chaos that shrieked about his ears" (HD 216). The description of Tony's inner turmoil represents a divergence from Waugh's usual external methods of characterization, as he chooses to emphasize Tony's mental distress. Waugh indicates that a humanist attitude such as Tony's is ultimately flawed, as it relies upon decency and reason

136 without the influence and support of religious belief. Therefore, Tony becomes unable to come over his hard times and modern environment.

Tony's sense of disillusionment is completed when he realizes that his old way of life, which he refers to as 'a gothic world', has irreparably changed: "there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled …" (HD 236-37). It is a wandering modern world in which Tony is uncertain of what to do next, he falls back on conventional behaviour when he decides to begin a journey to Brazil in search of a mythical city: "it seemed to be the conduct expected of a husband in his circumstances" (HD 247). Tony's expedition reveals that he cannot get rid of his old way of thinking, as he simply transfers his yearnings for his old 'gothic world' onto this mythical city, which he imagines to be "Gothic in character, all vanes and pinnacles, gargoyles, battlements, groining and tracery, pavilions and terraces" (HD 253). His traveling companion, Dr. Messinger, explains that this city holds a different meaning for each person:

"Every tribe has a different word for it. The pie-wies call it the 'Shining' or 'Glittering,' the Arekuna the 'Many Watered,' the Patamonas the 'Bright Feathered,' the Warau, oddly enough, use the same word for it that they use for a kind of aromatic jam they make" (HD 251)

Patey recognizes that the fabled City is "merely the embodiment of each quester's appetites and desires" (Patey, 1998: 122) which is why Tony hopes to find a 'transfigured Hetton' (HD 253). In seeking a place of refuge and enlightenment – a 'radiant sanctuary' (253) – all that indicates that Tony presents a humanist way of thinking that T. E. Hulme had described as 'Romantic': "you don't believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don't believe in a heaven

137 on earth" (Hulme, 1998: 68-83,71). Patey notes that, as a Catholic, Waugh believed that "there is no earthly paradise of perfected human nature and satisfied desire" (Patey, 1998: 122). In Waugh's terms, Tony's humanist quest is doomed to fail from the start.

Instead of facing a gothic refuge, Tony enters the domain of Mr. Todd, whom the reader (like Tony) might initially view as a form of savior. After all, Tony is found wandering, delirious in desperate need of food, water, and clothing. However, Todd's role gradually changes from that of rescuer to captor when Tony finds himself imprisoned within the camp. Tony is drawn into a boring regime that involves – perversely – endless reading aloud novels by Charles Dickens. When Todd explains his passion for Dickens he states: "there is always more to be learned and noticed, so many characters, so many changes of scene, so many words" (HD 329).

Actually, Todd is trapped in repetitive cycle of thinking, in which he wants Tony to partake: "we will not have any Dickens to-day … but to-morrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Let us read Little Dorrit again" (HD 340). Stannard claims that Waugh's references to Dickens represent an implicit criticism of the Victorian author's work, which Waugh associated with the 'old men' and their concepts of progress' (Stannard, 1988: 329). Consequently, the repetitive and sinister use of Dickens's novels in this scene could indicate that Waugh perceived Dickens's humanist faith in social progress to be similarly dangerous and misleading. The irreligious nature of Todd's regime is confirmed when God is dismissed by both Tony – "I've never really thought about it [belief in God] much" – and Todd: "I have thought about it a great deal and I still do not know" (HD 328).

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By the end of the novel Tony realizes that he is imprisoned indefinitely within this cyclical lifestyle. And, as Patey argues, this predicament represents Waugh's way of portraying the "living death that all Humanism amounts to" (Patey, 1998: 122). This idea of a 'living death' can be also interpreted as Waugh's depiction of a form of Christian punishment. In an article entitled 'Fanfare' (1949), Waugh explained that A Handful of Dust "was humanist and contained all I had to say about humanism" (EAR 134). This statement bemuses some critics, including Malcolm Bradbury, who finds it misleading and ambiguous: "what has Waugh to say about humanism? It is hard to know" (Bradbury,1994: 66). According to that, the ending of A Handful of Dust can be viewed as a stance of Waugh's anti-humanist as he portrays the doomed character of Tony Last. Waugh offers a damning indictment of how a valuable and civilized way of life in England has been condemned to deteriorate due to the absence of traditions, moral values, and religious belief. So, we can suggest that Waugh implies that this lifestyle will be replaced eventually by a destructive and irreligious modern social scene that is populated by meaningless socialites.

In this novel, the majority of characters are essentially irreligious and they are shown to adhere to humanist or secular living and follow a lifestyle that is disconnected from faith in God. The character that represents dedication to this routine is, for example, Tony Last who is rigidly keeping his daily habits. This implies that he is in need of something to believe in. Waugh alludes to the idea that this desire for belief is tragically misplaced, as he incorporates disturbing and pessimistic endings into his fiction: Tony Last is condemned to perpetual imprisonment in the jungle. These morbid

139 conclusion could reflect Waugh's cynical belief that purely humanist and secular lifestyles are essentially futile and deadly.

In this period, Waugh's fiction diverges in terms of the genre he uses, the topics of his novels, and his style of writing. He uses comedy and satire to depict various societies in his novels. As with Decline and Fall, he predominantly uses an external satiric form with which he concentrates on depicting the revealing and self-damning dialogue of his characters, as opposed to explicitly stating his authorial stance in his work. It can be suggested that Waugh alludes to the fallibility of man, from which the need for religion to explain man's inner evil and offer a pure way of life. This innate fallibility is the predominant reason why Waugh believes that secular and humanist systems cannot work. Following Waugh's view of man's innate savagery , we can propose that he suggests, in his fiction, that religious values need to be taken into account when thinking about social order.

4.2 The Modern man's Image

Love Among the Ruins (1953) is a satiric, strange, and dystopian story conveying the hard situation of modern man in England. Crime is treated not much seriously by the government that makes the life in prison is quite better than the case outside. Thus, many people suffer from depression and melancholy to the extent that the modern man prefers prison to freedom and death to life.

However, in this story, one finds that Waugh has selected different and fantastic ways to signify his impression on chaos and the decline of values and culture in such a fallen modern world. Waugh ironically depicts the prison of Mountjoy as a five star hotel with a

140 very joyful garden and the rooms of murderers and sex offenders lay along the garden front. "His room was not one of the grand succession which lay along the garden front. Those were received for murderers. Nor was it on the floor above, tenanted mostly by sexual offenders. It was a humbler wing".(LATR, 2). Fredrick L. Beaty says that:

one of the most appealing ironies in the story is the way in which the narrator introduces the reader to Mountjoy. His description of a splendid manor house and its magnificent gardens give no hint of its being a place of incarceration until he explains that the best rooms along the garden front are given to murderers and sex offenders (Beaty,1992, 21).

Waugh presents the atmosphere in which the hero of this novella, Miles Plastic, takes a walk in the beautiful garden as "a rich, old-fashioned Tennysonian night"(LATR, 1). All this beauty of Tennysonian night is dissolved before the brute and gracelessness of the Welfare State. Here, Waugh shows a contrast to give a symbolic atmosphere of such nights associated with stagnancy, lifelessness, and death. He uses special words and descriptions like "the basin, folded lilies, no gold fin winked in the porphyry font" (LATR, 1) as well as the killing of the whole flock of the peacocks that stand as a symbol of life "… for the whole flock of them [peacocks] had been found mysteriously and rudely slaughtered a day or two ago in the first disturbing flush of this sudden summer". (LATR, 1)

In fact, this slaughter is a savage picture; it is like the picture of the soldier in Abyssinia in the novel Black Mischief when the soldiers ate their boots. Depicting such an awful deed, Waugh wants to prove that the prisoners are not in a good condition of rehabilitation. On this sense, Stopp reflects Waugh's deep attention when he comments that:

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The slaughtering of the peacocks may be seen as both satire and burlesque farce. Satire, it reveals the pointlessness of the new penology of reclamation by culture. Human nature is unregenerate at this level; Sweat slaughtering the peacock is Connolly's native levies eating the boots. Farce, because the destruction of an over-ripe aesthetic perfection is pleasurable in itself. But satire is caricature and burlesque when informed by moral indignation; and the besetting weakness of many critics of Mr. Waugh is to infer satire when it is not uniformly present, but only the mixed ingredients of farce, satire, and the comedy of manners. (Stopp, 1958, 189-190)

Waugh presents the protagonist, Miles, in a humorous manner when he is sent to prison for arson with the first group of prisoners and then, when he is about to be released from the jail as a recovered man "in the morning, the Governor and the Minister of Welfare congratulate him for he is the first successful product of Mountjoy, inform him for his new job in the Euthanasia Service and pose for publicity stills". (Davis, 1989, 227). Confirming that the life inside the prison is more pleasant than the world outside, in his first scene, Miles is portrait that he is very sad and feels boring because he approaches his release from Mountjoy. Therefore, he asks the officials about what he can do to come back to prison, "what must I do to get back here?" (LATR, 13).

Actually, Miles is like the other characters in most of Waugh's novels for he is seeking a refuge or comfort by making a love relationship with a woman. He is wandering aimlessly and feels disappointed because of this sterile world – looking for escape to achieve his desire of revenge by burning fire in the buildings and institutions. Here, Waugh focuses satirically on the image of modern

142 man who is surrounded by chaos and disorder. The world in which the psychologists defend Miles' act as normal, so the Air Force authorities has sympathized with him and the charges of multiple manslaughters are reduced to a plain arson and simple charge of antisocial activity.

In fact, Waugh criticizes the social system which produces criminals and negative members. So, according to him, Miles Plastic is represented as the 'Modern Man' who has been molded by the Welfare State as the Minister declares that: "But I understood that Plastic is from one of our own Orphanages' … 'Exactly', said the Chief Guide, 'Miles is our first success, the vindication of the Method" (LATR, 10). Waugh mocks at the speech of the Chief Guide of the New Penology when he says: "In the New Britain which we are building, there are no criminals. There are only the victims of inadequate social services"(LATR, 10). Accordingly, no one is "held responsible for the sequence of his own acts"(LATR, 10) and 'maladjusted' persons are no longer called criminals and they received better treatment than the ordinary people.

Thus, being lived in this bad and corrupted social system, Miles' promotion of his new job in the Euthanasia is not gained by his good qualifications but by his antisocial merit of arsonist. It is his special way of escaping the boredom, disappointment, or things bother him. Therefore, miles finds a relief in committing pyromania opposing to any logical instructions and without any responsibility on his part. For example, his burning of the air force base which causes the death of many air-men helps him to change his job of unknown dishwasher and a washer of officers' underclothes to a distinguished official in the department of Euthanasia. Actually, Waugh in most of his writings uses such portraits to criticize the faithlessness and rootlessness of a

143 new generation that has arisen in the postwar world, especially whom he called The Bright Young people. He ironically ridicules them in this novella as in some of his novels like Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. "Only the very bright boys get posted to Euthanasia" (LATR, 19). Stopp comments that:

by an ironic signal on communal need of enterprise and worthless plans provided by the 1951 festival buildings, by their most distinguished features, the 'Dome of Discovery', Waugh portrays the Dome of Security that is an example of the complete self-defeating nature of social security projects. (Stopp, 154).

The eponymous dome had looked well enough in the architect's model, shallow certainly but amply making up in girth what "it lacked in height … But to the surprise of all, when the building arose and was seen from the ground, the dome blandly vanished" (LATR, 15).

In such unavailing social system, security is provided for all but it fails to give a straight answer to planners, exactly as Waugh says in this story "great sheets of glass to 'trap' the sun, admitted few gleams from stretches in their coat of tar"(LATR, 18). In this sense, the officials lived and practice their acts in a decaying and dark domes to be a sort of chaos. To confirm Waugh's theme of worthlessness, aimlessness, and bewilderedly plans, Davis comments that:

Like many novels set in the future, Love Among the Ruins is really about contemporary society, in this case Welfare State English, black and unlovely under the postwar austerity program instituted by Attlee's Labour government. The festival of Britain in 1951 was intended to announce to the world that England had recovered in finances and moral, and a central feature of the exposition

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was the Dome of Discovery – which Waugh converts into the Dome of Security (Davis, 1989, 220).

After a month at the Health Centre, Miles meets Clara, the heroine of this story, a girl whose beard is the result of Voluntary Sterilization. Here, Waugh wants to reflect the abnormality of modern society through these characters, Miles and Clara, when Miles wants to declare his love and his admiration to Clara's beard, he says "I think your beard is beautiful"(LATR, 26). It seems that Waugh wants to show his interest in the image of bearded ladies like Pimpernel a friend of Parsnip, "a poet of the 30s who came daily but usually jostled to the back of the crowd"(LATR, 44). Cyril Connolly comments that:

He does, however, reveal two unexpected interests, in pyromania and in bearded ladies. It is the heroine's beard which lures Miles Plastic into the classical past and enfranchises him from his compulsory freedom. This is very odd because a bearded lady is also a central figure in Mr. Auden's libretto, 'The Rake's Progress', and Messrs. Auden and Isherwood are connected in my mind with Mr. Waugh's characters Parsnip and Pimpernel, who are resuscitated for a parting thrust in 'Love Among the Ruins' (Connolly, 1953, 353).

The poet, Parsnip who is mentioned in two Waugh's literary works is used as a symbol of Waugh's fictional history. In Put Out More Flags, Waugh satirizes W. H. Auden and his friend Christopher Isherwood represented by the characters of the two poets Parsnip and Pimpernel as they talk to each other that "they should not leave their native land in a difficult time" (LATR, 45). In Love Among the Ruins, Parsnip seem to be a feeble character and he is no longer a literary figure just like Dr. Beamish, a man of thirties who always queues at the Euthanasia centre but loses his stomach in order to get the door.

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Then, in a calm day, Parsnip gets an admission to the centre and stands firmly. Waugh, in this scene, seems to be enjoyed by portraying these two characters to be an embodiment of Auden and his friend Isherwood, who wants to ruin themselves rather than live in their own world they have created. As David Lebedoff states that: "for Waugh, these writers became the new Cruttwells, though English libel laws being what they were, he changed their names to Parsnip and Pimpernel when he ridiculed them in print" (Lebedoff, 2008, 94).

However, the relationship between Miles and Clara become very strong in an extent that they spend most of their time in Clara's room which is furnished with pictures and other old objects belong to the past. These things remind Miles of jail as he said "it reminds me of prison"(LATR, 30). So, in this occasion, the narrator says that Miles' comment is "…the highest praise he knew" (30). Here, Waugh refers to the shallowness of modern man represented by the character of Miles to be gentle in such occasion. In this sense, Patricia Corr says that:

…the most incisive comment on the monster modern man is to be found in the description of the state made Miles Plastic, hero of Love Among the Ruins: 'No clean-living, God-fearing, Victorian gentleman he; no complete man of the Renaissance; no gentile knight nor dutiful pagan nor, even noble savage he was the modern man'. (Corr, 1962, 389)

Actually, Miles' love for Clara is increased and flourished mostly because of her silvered beard that reminds him of flam which he loves more than the pure human love. One night while they were sitting together at a moony summer, Miles said that "On such a night as this I burned an Air Force Station and half its occupants"(LATR,

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30). In this regard, it can be noticed that Waugh has linked Miles' memories of arson with the description of Clara's beard as it is shown in the novella that "Clara's beard was all silvered like a patriarch's in the midnight radiance"(30). In fact, Waugh wants to ridicule upon the abnormality and absurdity of the wandering modern man. For Miles, Clara's long, silken, corn-gold beard is the complete beauty and enjoyment that inspires him with a flame of love, but such a flame is not the human's real love. This flamed unnatural love gives the impulse to throw it out of his body in a savage and brutal way, which is normal for him, to complete his pleasure, especially when it linked with his burning of the Air Force Station. Therefore, Miles feels with a moment of high delightfulness when he burns a building.

In fact, Waugh mocks at the wandering modern man through the character of Miles and his escapist enjoyment in burning a fire. It is Waugh's style to express his deep feeling of disillusionment and to criticizes the modern society in which he lives. Accordingly, Lebedoff argues that:

This growing displacement of all values in life by materialism and escapist pleasure was the first big problem that Orwell and Waugh feared in the modern age… The problem is not that entertainment has corrupted modern life, but somewhat the reverse: Our diversions lack content because our lives do as well. A society rich in goods but devoid of values can continually improve the quality of its toys but cannot invest escape from emptiness. (Lebedoff, 2008, 189)

Another image used by Waugh is that Clara as a woman is supposed to be a symbol of fertility but in this story she has been used as a symbol of sterility as she is presented with a bearded face and she

147 is compared with a patriarch. Consequently, when she became pregnant, she chose to have abortion and to have an operation of replacing her bearded face to a rubber jaw in order to return to dance, "… something quite inhuman, a tight, slippery mask, salmon pink" (LATR, 40). Elisa Morera de La Vall comments that:

In Love Among the Ruins, the representative of the female sex, Clara, has made of art, in the form of dancing, a god, upon whose alter she is prepared to sacrifice her fertility. As the result of an abortion to make her sterile Clara grows an incongruous beard, perhaps as a premonition of a hybrid race in the future. (Vall, 2008, 297)

On Santa Claus Day, Miles visits Clara in the hospital "one of the unfinished edifices" with its shallow nature building, reflects the emptiness behind the facades of New Britain; as it is "all concrete and steel and glass in front and a jumble of huts behind" (LATR, 37). After a night of love beneath the moon, Miles takes a walk with restless feeling, going to Mountjoy, burning it and going back home with pleasure. So, he commits a very savage act at a very holy, sweet, and happy day with a very cool blood and without any responsibility. Depicting such a chaotic and hypocritical world, Waugh reveals that even the government ministers are unaware of Miles responsibility for the fire. On the contrary, he is assigned in an important job symbolized by briefcase and umbrella, of promoting the construction of a new, more modern Mountjoy to rise on the ruins of the old one.

'A greater Mountjoy will arise from the ashes, said the Minister.

'Those noble criminal lives have not been lost in vain'.

'There memory will inspire us'.

'Yes', said Miles. 'I heard the broadcast'.

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…. Now – I [the Minister] speak confidently- that opposition has become vocal and unscrupulous. There is, in fact, a whispering campaign that the fire was no accident but the act of one of the very men whom we were seeking to serve. That campaign must be scotched. (LATR, 49)

In burning Mountjoy, Miles is cut off from a human future and from the unapproachable human past. "He had made a desert in his imagination which he might call peace. Once before he had burned his childhood. Now his brief adult life lay in ashes" (LATR, 43). Burning of Mountjoy destroyed the Miles' passion for Clara and he does not feel happy when the State arrange marriage for him to the 'gruesome' Miss Flower. "there is hardly time for them', said the Minister of Welfare. But we think that psychologically you will have more appeal if you have a wife by your side. Miss Flower here has every qualification" (LATR, 51). As this Occasion presents him with a new sort of melancholy and unhappiness, it motivates his pyromaniac traits. So, during the ceremony, he plays with his cigarette lighter in his pocket until he inflames himself.

"Then the mood veered. Miles felt ill at ease during the ceremony and fidgeted with something small and hard which he found in his pocket. It proved to be his cigarette- lighter, a most uncertain apparatus. He pressed the catch and instantly, surprisingly there burst out a tiny flame- gemlike, hymeneal, auspicious". (LATR, 51)

Consequently, the narrator's description of the 'flame-gemlike, hymeneal, auspicious' gives a hint that Miles committed suicide and his flame will likely reduce him and his marriage to ashes as well. Davis comments that:

Some critics find the story's conclusion depressing: Fredrick J. Stopp, contrasting it with Dennis Barlow's

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burning of 'his immediate past' find Miles' pressing of the lighter 'no liberating action' and James F. Carens assumes that Waugh is predicting 'a civilization in which rebellion itself can only be futile and destructive'. Another and perhaps better way of saying it is that, given the society, destruction is itself a creative and laudable act. (Davis,1989:236-237)

By reflecting Miles' strong desire to go back to the jail, Waugh wants to confirm that, in such a modern world, life in the jail has been made to be more comfortable than life outside which has been made as a general condition of a big boring prison representing the modern society. Consequently, it can be suggested that Waugh wants to convey the deterioration and the destruction of modern society in which the modern man will be led to boredom, madness, and death. This case is linked with absurdities of the socialist system and the endless failure of its administration. As a result, the modern man has no choice only to be in a long queue at the door of euthanasia department in order to get rid of boredom of life through death which is considered to be the only gate to reach the social security.

The painful scene, in which a big crowd of sane depressed people in front of the euthanasia centre, indicates to the wandering, aimless, and disappointed modern man. For example, the director of the euthanasia centre, Dr. Beamish declares that "we shall have to start making charge for the service. It's the only way to keep down the demand"(LATR, 22). Dr. Beamish who proudly says that his "father and mother hanged themselves in their own backyard with their own clothes-line" (22). Furthermore, he criticizes these people that "no one will lift a finger to help himself" (22). He adds that the country is full of natural resources of death. "There are still rivers to drown in, trains-

150 every now and then-to put your head under; gas-fires in some of the huts. The country is full of the natural resources of death, but everyone has to come to us". (22)

It is one of the most painful image sketched by Waugh to reflect the deep agony and serious disillusionment of modern life. A life in which the slayer and the prey are victims to a corrupted social system. For instance, Dr. Beamish, whose parents hanged themselves with their own cloth-lines, is "an elderly man whose character had been formed in the nervous 30s, now much embittered, like many of his contemporaries, by the fulfillment of his early hopes"(19).

4.3 The Image of Death

In fact, death is the inescapable gateway either to Heaven or Hell. So, in this case, it can be deducted that Waugh tries to focus on the lack of religious beliefs and traditional values, as he has converted to Catholicism, especially at the time when new practices were displacing the moral principles in the western world where the spiritual values have inverted to materialistic treatment and human beings have become the goal of the decadent art instead of God. Actually, most critics have noted Waugh's concern with death-wish, hopelessness, and despair. But, as Calvin Lane states that "Waugh's deaths are ghastly funny and the reader is presented with death in grim and horrible force, as if he gets cruel pleasure in the grotesque detail of death" (Lane, 1981: 44). Supporting this idea, Vall asserts that "Waugh portrays a dystopian society that has lost all hope and therefore does not avoid of beautify death, but rather devalues and embraces it"(Vall, 2008: 185).

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In 1947, Waugh visited America on a business journey to negotiate the film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited by MGM. During his stay in Southern California, he was taken to visit Forest Lawn, an amazing cemetery. The visit encourage him to write the Loved One, a satirical novel about a deteriorating society that has to use special softened words as a kind of courtesy to veil the rude aspects of death which cannot be faced. In this novel, Waugh describes the city and its graveyard ironically as a kind of leisure resort where the immortal happiness is offered to its inhabitants and a dead person is presented to us as 'the loved one'. A few years later after Waugh wrote Love Among the Ruins he became more depressed. Therefore, he portrayed the society as a depressing and grim; people were barren of hope and as a result death is not fearful and is happily welcomed as an end to the unbearable burden of life. It is a dystopia of a disillusioned modern age, as Ian Littlewood affirms that:

'In different ways the words of the Loved One and Love Among the Ruins are just as depressing. Hollywood, Neutralia and the socialist state of the future have a common preference for the second rate and the synthetic. Their citizens are fed with lies. Waugh makes these things amusing, but not casually so. The more anarchic impulses of his humour are now being held in check'. (Littlewood, 1983, 56)

In fact, in Waugh's dystopian society , led by socialist politicians, directed by unskillful bureaucrats, and supported by unproductive workers, people get nothing except boredom and death. Beaty comments that in such a world "God replaced by the State, and human identity has been reduced to numbers and file cards" (Beaty, 1992, 20). Therefore, Waugh portrays the social life in the Welfare

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State as a fate that is worse than death and he also focuses on the Euthanasia Centre as a most popular service and a place of no holiday. "Next day, December 25th, was Santa Claus Day; no holiday in the department of Euthanasia, which was an essential service" (LATR, 37). Concerning the concept of Dystopia, Alexander Ruch argues that:

Although the term 'dystopia' predates 1900, dystopia became a recognizable literary genre during the twentieth century and has not lost its hold on our imagination in the twenty-first…[dystopian stories are] cautionary tales, social criticism, and thought experiments, these stories about terrifying futures generally tell us more about the conditions in which they are made than about any anticipated future… Dystopia is often seen by critics such as Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, and Mark Hillegas as an anti- Utopia genre, in the sense that is often presents a picture of the failure of some attempt to realize a utopia. Others, most notably Tom Moylan, have focused instead on the capacity of dystopia to critique the present state of affairs, perhaps even in the same of some utopia ideal. (Ruch, 2008, 2-3)

In the utopian society everyone works well with each other and everyone is happy under a very systematic order, but in the world of dystopia things become upside down; the wrong becomes right and the right is wrong, as it is clearly depicted in Waugh's Love Among the Ruins. It is a state of socially, morally, and politically corruption; a state in which people are dehumanized, oppressed, and completely dominated while utopian vision is created to inspire hope and ambition about an ideal possible life of a perfect society. Accordingly, negative opinions about a dystopian world have been emphasized by different authors to generalize the relationship between industrial technology and social changes. Especially, the writers who play an important role

153 of warning from the serious problems that result from the irresponsible conduct of people due to the lack of faith, decline of values, and disorganization of social and political system. As it is mentioned by Bradbury:

… an anti-utopian macabre comedy projected forward into a 1984 world of totalitarianism, rehabilitation centers, Departments of Euthanasia and the like, rather lacks the required liveliness; while the plot offers a "hopeful" picture of anarchy in man, it is not instinctively and comically engaged with it. (Bradbury, 1964, 103-104)

Huxley's Brave New World is also one of the good example of dystopia. He accurately portrays the tendencies inherent in our society today that indicate to the birth of the brave new world. The world we live in changes us to slaves of material and victims of the great development of technology. Most critics agree that Brave New World is a satiric literary work that criticizes the new assumption about scientific and technological progress. The modern world in which the 'individual' becomes wandering; searching his identity in another world or place perhaps he finds relief. Consequently, the modern man feels perplexed and he does not know what to do in this brutal world. For example, Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent observe that "Twentieth century science-fiction emerges as the characteristic genre expressing both the hopes and fears of our own era. The modern dystopia crystalizes the anxieties that increasingly accompanied the onward march of progress" (Claeys and Sargent,1999: 3).That is why the issues of Huxley's Brave New World and Waugh's Love Among the Ruins become more suitable for our age every passing year. Thus, Waugh's novella was characteristically presented a reversed utopia.

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While utopian writers have always confirmed that virtue and noble moral values should be kept as the main principles in life. They consider adultery, pre-marital sex, prostitution, drunkenness, gambling, theft, as outlawed and severely punished; contrary to that of dystopian world with all its anti-utopian sense which represents disorganization and disintegration of all levels, the individual, the family, and the community. Actually, these decadent merits has become the dominant scene of our modern world which is shown clearly in the modern media, TV-show, broadcasts, and websites – images of "natural disasters, accidents, crimes, wars, diseases, social injustice … convey a picture of a world where nothing works – in short, dystopia now" (Hynes, 1996: 212). Therefore, such disastrous and chaotic images can be considered as a declaration of the death of utopia to be replaced by dystopia. With this sense, Krishan Kumer remarks that:

One is bounced through the ancients – the biblical prophets, Plato and the Greeks; hurried throughout the Middle ages, with a glance at Augustine; served up More, Campanella and Bacon as a substantial dish; then finished off with the nineteenth-century socialists: often with a coda which proclaims or laments the death of utopia in our own country. (Kumar,1987: vii)

In fact, dystopia is usually associated with a bad place based on fear. Now, the world, in which we live, is full of dystopian events; horrible events and calamities are everywhere. But, at the other hand, we are still looking for alternatives, though it is an imaginary wishes. Utopia is considered as an essential need at least to inspire us the required energy that makes us able to endure the burdens of the present time and to live with a hope that one day we will see the light

155 at the end of the tunnel. Such a vision comes from the sense of what we can imagine we can create. In fact, this philosophy could be associated with the Gandhi's, Martin Luther King's, and Nelson Mandela's utopia. They all lived in a dystopian age and endured hard circumstances only for a hope that one day things would be changed and the future would be better. For instance, Luther King addressed the gatherings at the March in Washington for jobs and freedom where he delivered a famous speech that is known as 'I have a Dream' (Luther King, 1963: unpaged). Thus, utopia is a very important trait that can open up a better future, whereas dystopia is always associated with disillusionment and despair because it poisons our outlook to the present, or even motivates us to give up trying to do better.

However, we should not neglect the opinions of some critics who argue that to create a utopian vision or dystopian one is a matter of personal ideology. For example, yesterday's utopia may be looked like today's horror circumstances; in the case that a particular utopian perspective vision may be become dark and disturbing to others. It is just like the utopian slogans of American president George Bush and his comrades when they attack the Iraqi country in 2003 claiming that they come to liberate the Iraqis from a dictatorial regime. This utopian vision is may be seemed a dystopian one to millions of Iraqi people who are displaced, killed, and still fighting against that cause to get stability and freedom. For Kumar who believes that there is no what is called classical or Christian utopia as he remarks that:

But, firstly, utopian is not universal. It appears only in societies with the classical and Christian heritage, that is, only in the West. Other societies, have in relative abundance, paradises, primitivist myths of a Golden Age of justice and equality, Cokaygne-type fantasies, even

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messianic beliefs; they do not have utopia. (Kumar, 1987: 19)

Whereas in Waugh's dystopia, euthanasia is permitted and adopted by the government; it is not in Thomas Moore's utopia, who was opposed to euthanasia, but it was practiced by the utopians; suicide was advised by priests if someone is terminally ill though the sick are well looked-after. Actually, Waugh extrapolates the future of the Welfare State due to the horrible and destructive impact of the Two World Wars on society in general. Moreover, the changes that took place in England by Labour government; such situation, specially between the Two World Wars became shockingly unkind and violent on a grade scale. Furthermore, the loss of identity and the increasing mechanization of society left the modern people falling in a difficult choice – fearing the future of science – perplexed and wandering – they do not know what to do and where they are going. As Davis illustrates that, "the future of secularized and leveled according to socialist platforms of the 1930's and practices of the 1940's will be sterile and boring beyond sane endurance" (Davis, 1989: 226).

As it seems clear through most of their writings, Waugh and other intellectuals like T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Oswald Spengler, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell, that the old world had been destroyed and corrupted by the First World War and that the principles which guided the Western civilization were no longer valid and the future would be gloomy, anarchic, and faithless. However, Waugh believed that Western civilization is in advanced state of decay. Jeffrey Heath asserts that Waugh "was convinced that unless civilization is animated by correct religious values, it turns into a shadowy, insubstantial fraud" (Heath, 1982: 195). Such belief provided him with an order and principle for his literary works and his

157 view of the modern world. They enhanced his writings to be at odds with the modern world like many of his contemporaries, Joyce, Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Yeats; a world that seemed to them increasingly synthetic. Accordingly, James Matthew Morris and Andrea L. Kross explain that:

Utopia via government has grown, other writers have continued to issue their warnings to the West through their dystopian novels. One of these is Evelyn Waugh's story 'Love Among the Ruins': A Romance of the Near Future (1953), a picture of England of the future. Yet despite these grim warnings and others, belief in the possibility of achieving a utopian earth has persisted in the 20th century and into the 21st. (Morris and Kross, 2004: xxxvi)

In this sense, Stopp asserts that "The modern state is just boring, and the mode of its rejection varies between distaste and petulance" (Stopp, 1958: 191-192). Louis Osborne Coxe also remarks that what bothered Mr. Waugh about the society of modern England are the people. He does not like them, and he does not like life itself because he does not have any attachment to places or people, "…only a vague hagiology, a hankering after some lost innocence, a time when everyone loved Beethoven quarters and could tell good cognac from cheap brandy" (Coxe, 2002: 363).

However, with all the respect for such views, one can feel and touch what is happening nowadays, whether socially or politically, over the entire world, especially in the third world countries. The same images are embodied in clear portraits mentioned in most of Waugh's literary works that make him one of the main satirical novelists of the twentieth century. So, Waugh's satire goes beyond the absurdities of the contemporary world. In an essay on Waugh's reputation, 'A

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Prophet Without Honour: Evelyn Waugh's Reputation 100 Years On' published in 2003, Geoffrey Wheatcroft declares that Waugh "was not behind his time, but in so many ways far ahead of it" (Wheatcroft, 2003: 16). And also Lebedoff asserts that "For a man who had found the Modern Age untenable even in the 1920s, one can imagine his [Waugh] disgust with the 1960s" (Lebedoff, 2008: 217). But, on this base, how can we imagine Waugh's disgust of our present time!

4.4 The Image of Love

Although, Waugh, in Love Among the Ruins, expresses his pessimistic vision about the modern world, the story also shows the importance of love and its role in life; love by which man can live in peace. In fact, there is an evident connection between Browning's poem, Love Among the Ruins and Waugh's Novella, Love Among the Ruins. Both presents a kind of invitation for love instead of war. Nearly a century before Waugh wrote this novella Great Britain was under Queen Victoria's rule and this Kingdom was the largest empire in the word; the empire in which the sun has never set. But the time Waugh Wrote this novella, the world had totally changed. The Great Empire had vanished and its capital, London, became a ruined city.

In the Browning's poem, Love Among the Ruins, the capital of the Great Kingdom, London, is described in exciting and expressive words. The poet presents a portrait of how the people of this empire were moved; it was full of men who sacrificed their lives for the glory and war "Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe" (Browning, 31). While in Waugh's novella, London is portrayed as an old, paralyzed, and ruined city instead of being an active capital of a great

159 empire. In Browning's poem, the city was regarded as a ruins of ancient civilization, and only a "Single turret that remains / On the plains" (Browning, 37-38). While the city of Waugh's novella, is filled with ruins, smoke, fire, sloth, and death. The man of this modern age has destroyed everything and consequently he became savage and destructive beast.

Significantly, it is like Browning's poem in which the speaker is dedicated to painting the vivid life of an ancient city rather than describing his beloved. Waugh is also not emphasizing the love relation between Plastic Miles and Clara, but he focuses on the corruption and the atrocity of the modern Welfare States and its euthanasia center which instead of helping people with the essential needs of living, they facilitate their death in committing suicide by injecting them. In both works, there is a dramatic irony. In Browning's poem it arises from the speaker's fascination with the fallen empire, while in Waugh's novella it comes out from both: the remarkable fallen morality of modern man associated with the destruction of the city. So, Miles and Clara are searching for an escape from the troubled world in which they are living in an isolation and a passive atmosphere. Through this scene, one can suggest that Waugh uses motives of destruction and love at the same time to give a massage that though there is a world full of ruins but also still there is love.

In fact, the difference between the two loves in Browning's poem and Waugh's novella is that Miles' love is associated with hatred and destruction whereas the Wanderer's love is an absolute enjoyment because it is a pure and spiritual love. Miles' love is a sterile one because it lacks the real passion and spirituality. So, he finds an absolute enjoyment in firing buildings. His beloved though she is a girl

160 yet she has a yellow beard looking like an old man. Even when she became pregnant she decided to make abortion to get rid of the baby and return to dance. She prefers to be a dancer rather than to be a mother. Here, Clara plays the role of the modern woman. She is like the lady of the rocks in T. S. Eliot's world. She is sterile, unproductive, and a source of atrocity instead of love, fertility, and peace, so she is the modern woman.

However, the two works of Browning and Waugh can be considered as a slogan of being in love instead of war. A slogan which has been adopted by the antiwar activists especially after the misery and destruction of the Second World War. Actually, the scene of the new world portrayed in Waugh's Love Among the Ruins is miserable, corrupted, and deadly disillusioned. So, one can derive that Waugh's message is to treat and cure this condition, there is an urgent need of spiritual love. It is the solution which is well expressed by Browning's and Waugh's concept of love as an essential morality in which people can live peacefully.

In his first Inaugural Address on Monday, January 20, 1969, the USA President Richard Milhous Nixon, places emphasis on Browning's poem and Waugh's novella; both of them tried to give a warning that the world is in ruins, and a new beginning must be made. In this speech, Nixon considered that the social and political chaos of the period belonged to 'crisis of the spirit' as he states that:

To a crisis of the spirit, we need an answer of the spirit. To find that answer, we need only look within ourselves. When we listen to 'the better angels of our nature', we find that they celebrate the simple things, the basic things – such as goodness, decency, love, kindness. Greatness comes in simple trappings. The simple things are the ones most

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needed today if we are to surmount what divides us, and cement what unites us. To lower our voices would be a simple thing… We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another – until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices. (Nixon, 1969: 21-28)

In fact, such philosophy is very much the same as Waugh's who believed that the problem of the people in the modern age is because they are far away from God. Thus, disintegration and deterioration of society and the family relations became visible in the daily behaviour of modern man. Lack of religious values and traditional traits lead to the fall of modern man who goes wandering and perplexed seeking for something to feed his empty soul but his effort leads him to suicide and hell. So, life without God is regarded as a sort of boredom and death. However, there is another reason behind the decadence of modern man that is the corruption, selfishness and adventures of the rulers. Consequently, man has to sacrifice himself for the sake of their foolish decisions. Thus, unfortunately, the suffering of the individual will continue unless he goes back to practice faithfully the real mission of his creation.

In fact, the title of the novella refers to love that takes place in the middle of the ruins. Thus, love can emerge from the most difficult situations because there is no life without love. Connolly argues that "Love Among the Ruins has no erotic content; it is pure slapstick, and depends for its success on the neatness of its paradox and the brilliance of its timing. One must judge such a book as if it were a film sequence or a scene in a revue" (Connolly, 1953: 352). At the end of the story, the protagonist Miles chooses death to put an end to his life by

162 burning himself. He prefers death to an absurd life within a meaningless world.

The author has sum up his own annoyance, resentment, and disappointment like Huxley's Brave New World, which is regarded as a rebel of old-world lovers against the new type of authority. It is a foolish, hypocritical, and disgusting world in which the modern man turned to be as a number or an object empty of passion and spiritual love. In this futile world, the socialites have lost their authentic existence, and they become wandering; searching for asylum even by death to get rid of this boredom within an absurd world.

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Chapter Five

Conclusion

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Chapter Five Conclusion 5.0 Conclusion

Evelyn Waugh is a journalist, essayist, novelist and a social critic of black humour who mixes violent scenes with laughter. He writes travel books and dairies as well. He believes that the only way to deal with this unhappy world is to laugh at it. Therefore he directed his fictions for entertainment. He is probably the most lasting satirist among British modernists. In most of his works he explores the implications of modernism, which suggests that it was not some temporary irregularity, but a serious attempt to create new ways of understanding the world and to embody them in literature. According to him modernity is the main threat to individuality which cannot exist apart from the roots of traditional morality and religious principles. Without such roots, no real personality can flourish.

Waugh's distinctive talent shines throughout his works and the reader is carried to and lives in the atmosphere that he brings to the front of his writings. Waugh converted to Catholic Christianity in 1930 believing that only with the Catholic faith he can save his dry soul. Throughout this period of the great changes and growing of the technological world, the power of traditional, religious and artistic symbols produced the catastrophes of war on one hand and the shattering of human beings on the other. Therefore, the art of this period traced the touching aspects of crisis, anxiety, loss of faith, paralysis, despair, hopelessness, chaos, sense of meaningless and death.

Waugh examines the horrible impact of the two World Wars and the social changes which resulted from and moulded the

165 uncivilized and barbaric new age. He has blended the history and modernity of changing and changeless things through his works. Waugh has gone through the journey of life exploring and unfolding the past into present by bringing out the pains of modernity in his work. He believed that the English civilization has collapsed and the people have returned to primitive life, therefore in Modern England there is no place for civilized man or woman. He represents an ancient nation turning a new page of history. He has frequently played the role of humorist in order to mock the decline of Western culture. In most of his works Waugh has portrayed a decadent world and mockingly tried to evoke disturbing behaviour, infidelity and self-indulgence in the form of illegal sex, drinking, drug-taking, and self-serving hypocrisy. He brings out a sense of modern chaos and explains its causes. Waugh was interested in recording what he professed to be the decadence of morality, family degradation, and the trivial daily behaviour in the social upper-class where the modern world was in a state of decay and practical corruption. He criticizes the English society for its secularity and consequent triviality by means of depicting the irreligious Bright Young People. These socialites of a post-war generation are depicted as wandering into a cyclic routine in order to escape contemporary problems. As they engage in pleasure-seeking and escapist behaviour by committing themselves to a social route of disintegration, repetition, and dissatisfaction. Such socialites could not bring relief or escape; instead, they are trapped in a trivial lifestyle that is destroying them as they try to live within it. In such a world there is clear loss of personal identity, where sexes are hardly distinguishable; people start to wear the same clothes and speak in the same voice.

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In fact, he is like Emile Zola, Stephen Crane, Jack London and Graham Greene, Waugh personifies his characters with the eye of the naturalist as inhumane, savage, heartless, self-seeking and feeble. For him life is a jungle in which humans are analyzed like any other beast, where the social environment played a large part. Characters are fated to whatever stations in life prepare them for their heredity, surroundings, and social conditions. They are those who prey and those who are preyed upon. The power of primitive emotions that counteracts human reason was also a chronic element. Characters are subjected to various impulses in order to test reactions. Waugh portrays them in a way that if one reads his novels he will feels as if he were watching a film. Thus, Waugh paints the picture of his characters with the brush of realism and the stroke of authenticity vivifying the truth. He needs no magical realism infused into his writings for the entire world becomes magical through the power of his literary expertise. His greatest asset is his quality of reminiscence and his greatest strength lies in depicting the human heart with all its longings and imperfections.

The human behaviour depicted by Waugh is that of exiles, outcasts, and people with no valid land marks or guideposts. He believes that man, by nature, is an exile and will never be self-reliant or complete on this earth. Therefore, since the beginning of the twenties Waugh started to see the collapse of moral standards and dissolution everywhere. He did not like his age, the age of the Common Man who replaced himself in the place of the gentleman. There was no order in man’s life. Therefore Waugh rejected the modern world around him and saw it as a wasteland, but his humoristic gift helped him to reform the wilderness into a circus. He

167 depicted all the people of the modern age as sterile, paralyzed, and uprooted. Consequently Waugh, like many other novelists, portrays the individual as one who retreats from a declined world and boring society to a world of past traditions in which glory, faith and dreams were realizable.

For Waugh, man is inherently guilty and barbaric. He believes that the cultural values and social limits which are associated with the Catholic Church are required to control this barbarism. Without such limitations, Waugh thought that society would fall down into chaos. He believes that human beings are rootless and ludicrous without religious belief. He thinks that when they are truly religious, they will reach stability and relief. Therefore, religion and the real faith, for Waugh, are the only saviour, and the lasting shelter in such a chaotic world. He considers religion as the axis force in the individual’s life. Waugh considers humanism without faith is not better than barbarism. He believes that the loss of faith is one of the main reasons of England’s state of decline. He considers Christian humanism is much in need for spiritual struggle. He believes that as long as Man is God's creature with a defined purpose, man becomes more complete only with his relation to God. For him life is meaningless and unendurable without God. He finds the people, everywhere he meets, with no roots, no understanding of what life is about, no sense of the dignity.

Waugh believed that a complete life can only be achieved with real faith in God and when Death is kept firmly in mind. Therefore, if Man consciously turns away from that enjoyment, he is denying the purpose of his existence. He believed that the trouble of the modern world is that there is no enough religion in it. Without religion and traditions there is nothing to stop people doing whatever they like.

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Therefore, he dwelt on what he saw in the retreat of Modern Man from spiritual faith. Such a Man is active only with his daily physical lusts, without believing in life after death. For this reason, in most of his writings, Waugh shows that when people believe in heaven and hell, they behave differently than when they do not believe in the eternal life after death. He believed that Man should always consider Death as a welcome friend at any time.

Waugh reaches the status of philosopher, who searches and finds meaning everywhere. Waugh's vision does not fail to observe the degradation presented in the modern society. For the reader, everything seems to come alive because he actually sees the sights and hears the various sounds in addition to touching, feeling, and smelling the magnanimous world in all its varied colours.

Waugh succeeds in exploring the complexities of modern human life and captures its texture well. To Waugh the modern world is not a composite of visible facts; it is a bodiless harlequinade, where individual is still swamped in the mob and swept along by circumstances over which he has no control. In most of his works, Waugh attacks the debased modern world of dishonesty and darkness.

5.1 Inferences and Recommendations

In his first novel Decline and Fall (1928) Waugh brings out the history and destiny of a common man and mocks the behaviour of the English people, especially the upper and the middle class, their ways of life, the decline of moral values, the decline of the educational system, chaos, loss of faith, and barbarism. It is an episodic and comic story of an innocent man, Paul Pennyfeather, who was expelled from

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Oxford after he was caught in the web of London society for indecency. He enters a world where justice, fairness, kindness are forgotten. Waugh portrays Paul as an individual who is in retreat from a decaying and boring society. He is an epitome of the modern Man; a naïve and weak character. His unawareness of the evil and hatred around him has reduced his ability to deal with or to react against things happening to him. The novelist makes fun of his prejudices against the English educational system, the Welsh, and against well intentioned social reformers. He produces an atmosphere of futility and the absence of values which pervaded the English society after the disaster of the First World War; a society which had lost hope and stability. Waugh found the behaviour of the upper-class students not only unsophisticated but it was savage and amoral.

In Decline and Fall Waugh evokes the conflict between order and chaos where brutality and incivility are allowed to proceed uncontrolled by authority. In such a fallen world the innocents, like Paul Pennyfeather, suffer and are punished while the vicious like, the immoral Bollingers, Grimes, Philibric, and Mrs. Margot get off scot- free. Through the consequence of events which are loosely connected with one another Waugh tries, in a funny way, to depict Paul’s illusion about honour, gentlemanliness, education, society, love, human relations, the church, faith, the law, the prison system, and the personal identity through the constant appearance, disappearance and reappearance in another identity of the characters. Paul is inactive and weak. He wanders in a circular, sterile, meaningless, and fruitless movement, achieving nothing. At the end he returns, empty handed, to Scone College, from where he began again disguising himself with a moustache and assuming the identity of a distant cousin of Paul

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Pennyfeather. It is a circular world of nondevelopment, presents no more than a circular pattern of bareness and meaninglessness. It is a frivolous and futile world, impossible for anyone to grow or take a step forward.

Thus the world of Evelyn Waugh, in Decline and fall, is the typical modern world in which the condition of life is no more than slapstick actions. In such a world people play noisily on the revolving circle at which they cannot keep a hold. It is the world of Otto Silenus, the big wheel at Luna Park in which people merely enjoy the thrill of this kind of action on the stage of life without gaining anything or going anywhere. Actually, Waugh's literary works should remain situated within the framework of late modernist, as the presence of religious themes that indicate the beginnings of his move away from the world-view typically associated with the concept of life. So, the themes of wandering aimlessly, failure, collapse, and death are present within his novels, which could act as a warning to certain readers who wish to realize that these themes signal what will happen if modern society continues to live wandering without recourse to traditional religious values.

In A Handful of Dust (1934) Waugh portrays different realistic social issues, like the boredom of life, the collapse and sterility of marital relations, infidelity, the death of a child, the lack of faith, barbarism, and the horrible fate of a generous father. It seems that all coherence, morality, love, the sense of motherhood and what holds families together are gone and corrupted in the modern world. Through that Waugh also reveals his bitterness and agony at his first wife’s infidelity with a friend, which left a deep wound in his inner feeling he had never forgotten. It is a story of a civilized man, Tony

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Last, who drifted unresistingly to his destruction and died tragically. Tony’s punishment is due to his living blindly under the plight of the English curse of being cut off from the true faith. Tony is immature, and his love for the past holds him back, turning his ancestral home, Hetton Abbey, into a jail. Waugh strongly accused the modern civilization of its tangible social and moral disintegration. In such atmosphere, Tony is not overwhelmed by savagery only but is presented to a severe punishment by the modern society. In this novel Waugh portrays a realistic depiction of the conflict between declining upper class traditions and avaricious earthly materialism in a fashionable London society.

In fact, Waugh tries to show the rise of a new class to which tradition meant nothing but a clear lack of moral order. The social scene is one of gloomy filthiness and heartlessness. It is also enhanced with scenes of stabbing bitterness and silly lusts through which Waugh wanted to contrast two types of barbarism, one of them is demonstrated by proto-industrialist savages while the other is inherited in the moral decay of the British society. Waugh believes that all these curses are happened because the carelessness of religious consciousness and clerical practices. These two contrasting worlds seem to be united again. Through that he bridges the gap between modern civilization and barbarism. It is a moral book, about the destruction of a simple and tedious person by his adulterous wife and other vicious and immoral people without heart or affections. Waugh wants to show that the modern world is a sort of chaos, disorder, tendencies and passions. It is a conventional story of the failure of marriage in a fashionable society.

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In this novel the clash between modernism and barbarism is very clear; they are connected together in a modern pattern. All the long-established traditional values have been destroyed. Industrial savagery and plight of humanism reflect Waugh's depressed and disillusioned view of modern life. Like Joseph Conrad's world in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Waugh added other sort of barbarians at home and the civilized man's trouble among them. In such a world, Tony Last, a civilized man finds himself trapped in the Brazilian jungles only because he is literate and can read Dickens’ novels to his barbarous captor Mr. Todd. That is why Waugh mentioned, in one of his letters, that "The scheme [of A Handful of Dust] was a Gothic man in the hands of savages."(Letters 103). The adulterous Brenda Last in A Handful of Dust betrays not only her trusting, faithful husband Tony, but the whole way of life centered on his country manor house, Hetton Abbey.

In A Handful of Dust Waugh also makes clear how money and wealth is considered as everything in modern life in which the people do whatever they believe necessary to be rich. Like Mrs. Beaver who tore down a noble home and converted it into flats for lovers to spend some time with each other. It is a great pity that modern society does not consider other living things important when granting permission for buildings over green zones and pulling down trees. In such a world humanity is damning itself; the world is being ruined for every last possible cent. It is emotionless, ungentlemanliness and material world. John Beaver in A Handful of Dust, is only to live as a sponger and to avoid being responsible for anyone else. His relationship, like most of others, binds up only with monetary concerns where love becomes a matter of financial responsibility. In A Handful Dust Waugh considers

173 the new barbarians, who are everywhere in this modern age, more dangerous than the old barbaric tribes. Those have evidently devoted themselves to ruin not only the remains of the old heritage of the old Western tradition whenever they still stand but the social conventions in general and the marital lives of the people in particular. Waugh asserts that "Barbarism is never finally defeated…we are all potential recruits for anarchy." (Beaty, 1992: 69).

In Love Among the Ruins Waugh reveals his pessimistic and the horror vision of the new world. In this novella, he depicts the modern life as a stage of chaos, depression, fear and death. It is an age of nihilism. As a result of the Second World War, Waugh describes New Britain as a ruined world overwhelmed by chaos, sloth, and boredom. In this novella Waugh depicts the conditions in prison, where criminals are treated much better and quite superior than others by the State. It seems that life in such a world is difficult and disgraceful. People are hopeless and depressed; they prefer prison to freedom and death to life. Waugh sees the contemporary world as futile and anarchic hell; a world without principles. He depicts the days of the present time as filled with recklessness, madness, noise, wrongdoing and sin.

Contrary to the world of Browning’s poem Love among the Ruins, in Waugh’s novella Miles Plastic’s love is associated with hatred and destruction; while in Browning’s poem the wanderer’s love symbolizes glory and happiness. The wanderer finds absolute enjoyment in such a pure love while Plastic finds absolute enjoyment in firing and destroying buildings. As a result, the continuity of absurdity, chaos, disorder, corruption and the decline of gentlemanly values are visible with a profound sadness. In this novella Waugh

174 extrapolates the future of the Welfare State, due to the horrible destruction caused by the two World Wars and the change that took place in England by the Labour government; which was shockingly unkind and violent. Furthermore, the loss of identity and the social life in the Welfare State was worse than death.

Waugh depicts that Western civilization is in a state of decay and destruction. England, in Love Among the Ruins, is not the motherland Waugh knew and loved; it is a worn out country by ruin, depression and death. As modern life has some distinguished characteristics, loaded by the atrocities of the two World Wars, Waugh’s fictions parallel with modernist literature show this life as chaotic, gloomy and depressed. Like many artists of his age, Evelyn Waugh finds in the old past days and in the Catholic religion the safe shelter and the real authentic human values. Like T. S. Eliot, Waugh finds the paradoxical portraits the best way to express his disgust and satire of the decline of values, chaos, infidelity, betrayal, faithlessness and the disintegration of familial life in modern society. And, though many critics said that Waugh sank between fantasy of the old world and the hopelessness of his time; the fact is that Waugh put his finger on the wound to diagnose the social ills of his time and ours.

Accordingly one can conclude that Waugh completely believed that the best cure for these phenomena is the restoration of the old traditions and its authentic values. He believed that without shaping the discipline of tradition and without guidance, the individual is lost and at every moment he is trying to reinvent himself. Such philosophy is clear and tangible in the life of Paul Pennyfeather and Tony Last the heroes of Decline and Fall and A Handful of Dust who are

175 suffering because of the lack of any traditional tools which are very important in achieving self–restraint.

In these novels, Waugh portrays the heroes as orphans, young men thrown without help into a cruel world on their own to find themselves among visible symbols of the passing established order. They seem bare, immature and without psychological depth because they have no ability to analyze and understand neither themselves nor the world they are living in. The world portrayed in Waugh's novels is lasting. It is a world of untruthfulness, hypocrisy, frivolity, horror and anarchy; a world from which all spiritual values have been eradicated; a chaotic world in which the innocent suffer instead of the guilty. The world of Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust, and Love Among the Ruins are a vacant world, like the world of Dublin city in James Joyce’s Dubliners, in which Joyce's characters are wandering in a vicious circle of aimlessness, boredom and futility; though they are eternally active but they achieve nothing except failure and death because they are physically alive but spiritually dead. In Fact, lovers in most of Waugh’s novels are cheaters and liars, like Mrs. Margot in Decline and Fall, Mr. John Beaver and Brenda in A Handful of Dust. They are the real epitome of the modern lovers. They are superficial, and resist all attempts to voice their psychological interiors. Unlike Virginia Woolf who expresses the inner life of her characters, Waugh always stays outside of his novels’ scenes, rarely giving us more than a glimpse of motivation.

However, like the elder modern writers who preceded him, Waugh creates modern characters with old tools. His characters come out from the center of modern life's conflict and the tension of his personal experience from which they were born. He always places

176 them to the trial to see how they encounter the special conditions of modernity. As one of the distinguished humorist of the twentieth century, Waugh’s novels are based on sharp satires of disorderliness, chance events and the collapse of values and meaning in modern life. In Waugh’s eyes the struggle lies between truth, order and civilization, and their opposite, disorder and barbarism.

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