EVELYN WAUGH STUDIES Vol. 44, No. 3 Winter 2014

EVELYN WAUGH STUDIES Vol. 44, No. 3 Winter 2014 Arthur Waugh’s Influence, Part II: Tradition and Change John Howard Wilson Lock Haven University Arthur Waugh’s second collection of essays, Tradition and Change: Studies in Contemporary Literature, was published in 1919 and dedicated to his younger son, Evelyn Waugh. Arthur’s first collection, Reticence in Literature (1915), had been dedicated to his elder son, Alec. Evelyn clearly absorbed the content, but Tradition and Change naturally had more of an effect on him. The book’s influence can be sorted into five categories: (1) writers reviewed by both Arthur and Evelyn; (2) Alec Waugh’s experience as a soldier, and Arthur’s and Evelyn’s reactions to the Great War; (3) religion, especially Roman Catholicism, and how to write about it; (4) art and how to produce it; and (5) subjects raised by Arthur and taken up by Evelyn in writing. Especially in youth, Evelyn scorned his father and disclaimed any influence, but Tradition and Change obviously gave him much food for thought. Sometimes Evelyn accepted Arthur’s ideas; sometimes he rejected them; most often, he worked with them as an important contribution to his own inimitable oeuvre. As a young man, Evelyn preferred change, but as he aged, he showed more and more esteem for tradition and thus moved closer to his father’s conservatism. (1) Writers Arthur refers to many writers, and Evelyn employs several of the same names in his own work. There are six examples in Tradition and Change: Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Henry James (1843-1916), John Galsworthy (1867-1933), Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972), D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), and T. S. Eliot (1888-1965). Arthur was the managing director of Chapman and Hall, publisher of Dickens. In an essay entitled “Dickens’s Lovers” (focusing on his characters), Arthur described the author as primarily “theatrical” (Tradition 158). In his autobiography, A Little Learning (1964), Evelyn wrote that his “father’s most obvious characteristic was theatricality” (69), and “all the more likeable of Dickens’s characters provided him with roles” (70). Evelyn grew weary of these impersonations, and in A Handful of Dust (1934) he consigned Tony Last to the peculiar fate of having to read Dickens aloud to Mr. Todd. Still, Dickens was an invaluable source of reference, used by Evelyn throughout his career. Arthur wrote a review entitled “The Art of Henry James.” Many years later, in 1946, Evelyn exclaimed “What an enormous uncovenanted blessing to have kept Henry James for middle age” (Diaries 663). Both Arthur and Evelyn appreciated James, and in The Loved One (1948), Evelyn explored the Jamesian “Anglo-American impasse” (Letters 265). In another review, “Mr. John Galsworthy,” Arthur commented that the “spiritual assaults of the years of war have only served to strengthen in him that deep, humane creed which he urged upon us in the days of universal nonchalance” (Tradition 285). About this author Evelyn could not agree. As an indication of dullness, Paul Pennyfeather reads The Forsyte Saga at Scone College in Decline and Fall (1928). Much later, Evelyn wrote a remarkably unenthusiastic introduction to The Man of Property: Galsworthy “was not read in England by the younger generation of writers,” and the new villa in the novel “does not ring true” (Essays 620-21). In an essay entitled “The New Realism,” Arthur referred to the “enchanted pages” of Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street (Tradition 213). Both novel and writer became important to Evelyn. Sinister Street (1913) is in Charles Ryder’s rooms at Oxford in Brideshead Revisited (1945), though his early tastes fade when he meets Sebastian Flyte. In a review in 1956, Evelyn praised Mackenzie’s Thin Ice as a novel distinguished by “elegance and sound workmanship.” The hero is homosexual, and Evelyn had been through such affairs in the 1920s. Mackenzie was a Catholic convert, like Evelyn, who appreciated his fellow novelist’s emphasis on morality and his suggestion that “the characters improve with age” (Essays 511). Arthur had no patience with D. H. Lawrence: “Lawrence’s art stands most desperately in need of … a shower-bath of vital ideas” (Tradition 137). Evelyn quoted the judgment in A Little Learning (77). In earlier years, Evelyn was ambivalent: Lawrence’s Assorted Articles amounted to “a bore” (Essays 71), and Collected Poems suggested that “Lawrence’s finest poetry is in his novels” (Essays 42). In Robbery under Law (1939), Evelyn asserted that “Every traveler to Mexico must read The Plumed Serpent,” though it devolved into “one of the silliest stories in recent literature” (Waugh Abroad 725). Later in life, Evelyn seemed to accept his father’s dismissal: Lawrence “couldn’t write for toffee” (Letters 552). Arthur felt the same way about T. S. Eliot, whom he compared to “a drunken slave among the sons of the household” (Tradition 39), also quoted in A Little Learning (78). Eliot responded in his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919; Menand 81). Evelyn found Eliot’s poems “incredibly good” in 1926 (Diaries 242), he took the title A Handful of Dust from The Waste Land (1922), and the same poem inspires Anthony Blanche’s recitation in Brideshead. In A Little Learning, however, Evelyn belittled Eliot as “the future idol of the academies” (78). Arthur had conveyed his appreciation of English literature, and Evelyn never thought of it “as a school subject … but as a source of natural joy” (Learning 72). He also enjoyed ridiculing professors. On writers in general, Evelyn disagreed with Arthur in three cases (Dickens, Galsworthy, and Eliot) and agreed in three others (James, Mackenzie, and Lawrence). Arthur valued traditional writers (Dickens, Galsworthy, James, and Mackenzie), whereas Evelyn flirted with modernists (Eliot and Lawrence) before turning against them. After Arthur’s death in 1943, Evelyn went through a phase of James (an early modernist) and renewed a youthful fondness for Mackenzie. He never seems to have cared for Dickens or Galsworthy, perhaps because they were humanists (as were James, Lawrence, and Arthur Waugh), and Evelyn said he had finished with humanism in A Handful of Dust (Essays 304). (2) Alec Waugh and the Great War Another writer read by both Arthur and Evelyn was Alec Waugh. Arthur did not mention Alec in Tradition and Change, but he idealized his elder son and clearly had him in mind when describing Great Britain in 1919. In an essay entitled “Rupert Brooke and the War,” Arthur predicted that “the most self-centred generation in history is to be transformed into the most sympathetic and humane” (Tradition 153). Moreover, Arthur insisted in his review of Galsworthy, Great Britain must be “reborn to a nobler peace” in “a land worthy of the sons who gave their lives for her salvation…. Those who survive will be in bondage to the dead, to raise to their glory a memorial of the spirit” (291). If Evelyn ever felt his father’s hopes, he did not entertain them for long. He admired Alec, who inspired a character in a fragment of a novel in 1920, but Evelyn’s circle at Oxford ridiculed Alec in the early 1920s. This attitude persisted, though Evelyn also wrote a generous article on Alec in 1930. Arthur dismissed Evelyn’s Catholicism as “perversion to Rome” (Alexander Waugh 217), and Alec wrote that trying to understand Evelyn’s religion was like looking at the outside of a stained-glass window (218). When he wrote of his own experience in the Second World War, Evelyn reached a modest resolution, far short of what his father wanted from the First War. The Catholic hero of Evelyn’s war trilogy, Guy Crouchback, is not interested in national rebirth or spiritual memorials: he simply tries to preserve his own small family through newfound faith. Such faith seems to have been lacking in the other Waughs, and by converting to Rome, Evelyn embraced a tradition preceding his father’s Anglicanism. (3) Roman Catholicism Arthur was not well disposed toward Roman Catholics, but in Tradition and Change he showed some interest. In an essay on Lionel Johnson (1867-1902), Arthur notes that different writers have had different impressions of the Church. For Johnson, according to Arthur, the Church represented “an ordered habit of the mind, a discipline of the imagination, a seemly chain of tradition” (102), as it did for Evelyn after conversion in 1930. Arthur’s respect for Catholicism may have grown after Reticence, where literature was an alternative to religion. He conceded “that man cannot live by art alone” (Tradition 107). In an essay on “The Religious Novel,” however, Arthur accused R. H. Benson (1871-1914) of allowing “the preacher to overwhelm the novelist” in “vehement tracts, urging upon their readers a thousand and one arguments for enlisting in the Roman Catholic branch of the Christian Church” (229). Evelyn wrote a preface for an American edition of one of Benson’s novels, Richard Raynal, Solitary (1906, reprinted 1956), and he borrowed from another, Lord of the World (1907; see Patey). Criticism similar to Arthur’s has been repeatedly raised against Brideshead Revisited. Arthur believed that the religious novelist should be “detached in outlook, free from prejudice and the fever of partisanship. He must present a picture, not argue a cause” (Tradition 229). In these respects, critics generally hold, Evelyn’s early novels were more successful than Brideshead, Helena (1950), and the war trilogy (1952-1961). The early novels satirized religion, especially Anglicanism, but they were not obviously polemical. Arthur never cared for them, and he would not have liked the Catholic novels Evelyn published after his father’s death. (4) Art In Tradition and Change, Arthur expressed several aesthetic principles, most of them carryovers from Reticence in Literature.

Load more