Francmac;on

EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER

Volume 13, Number 3 Winter, 1979

THE GREAT LONG BEACH WAUGH MEMORIAL By Donald Greene On the evidence of his writings, had a life-long love affair with sea-going passenger ships. During the golden age of the ocean liner, around 1860 to 1960, the opportunities it furnished for fortuitous encounters and clandestine rendezvous proved a boon to writers of fiction generally, but few can have taken such great advantage of them as Waugh. Even so humdrum a vessel as a Channel ferry provided him with a superb opening for . Perhaps it was as much resentment of the airplane's annihilation of this novelistic resource as the personal discomfort it caused him that accounted for Waugh's detestation of this form of traveL The most ingenious fictioneer would be hard put to devise a delicious consummation of the passion of a Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte travelling at the speed of sound six miles above the Atlantic in a Concorde, or even a Boeing 747. Christopher Sykes's biography, Michael Davie's edition of the Diaries, and Waugh's own travel books make it easy to identify the original of many of Waugh's fictional vessels. That in which Tony Last (A Handful of Dust) sailed to his doom in the jungle is no doubt the Port of London, in which Waugh travelled to South America in 1932. William Boot's grubby Francmar;on of resembles the Azay le Rideau in which Waugh sailed to Djibouti to report the coronation of Haile Selassie. The Duchess of Clarence and Duchess of Cumberland, converted troopships in Put Out More Flage-though not very thoroughly con­ verted; witness the steward passing through the hordes of weary, sweating soldiers with his tray of dainty sandwiches, the regular evening repast in the first-class lounge-owe their names to the Duchess of Richmond, on which Waugh returned from the Middle East shortly before he began to write the book. Gilbert Pinfold's nightmarish vessel, "the S. S. Cali ban, Captain Steerforth, master," Sykes identifies only as "a small ship" sailing to Ceylon. It would no doubt be easy enough to track down her name, though on this occasion the original could have contributed little to the macabre product of Waugh's heated imagination. The most spectacular ship in Waugh's novels, however, seems not yet to have been identified in print-at least, so far as my reading of Waughiana goes. This is the great trans-Atlantic liner on which Charles Ryder in returns to England after two years of painting in South and Central America, together with his wife, the unamiable Lady Celia, and, as Fate would have it, Lady Julia Mottram, nee Flyte. Some facts about her (the ship, that is). She is enormous, so much so as to give a false idea of her stability ("Storms don't affect a ship like this, do they?" says Lady Celia at first; but later, with eyes "full of consternation and resentment," "I didn't know a ship of this size could pitch like this"). She is fast the voyage from New York to Southampton recounted in the novel takes four and a half days, which was indeed the fastest regularly scheduled time for that crossing in the 1930s (the fictional year is 1936, probably in the fall, since the chief topic of conversation among the guests at the "private view" of Charles's paintings a month later is "Mrs. Simpson"; the destination is Southampton, since, on the morning of her arrival, "the green coastline of Devon" is seen on the ship's port side). She is probably British; at least, the officer who runs the tombola (bingo) games knows the standard lingo-"Ciickety-click, sixty-six; Kelly's eye, number one; legs, eleven"-originating with the British Army in the First World War, where, as Brigadier Hook in Men at Arms points out, it was the traditional game, under the name of "Housey-housey." · And she is new: she is furnished and decorated in the most"advanced" style of the early 1930s. Here is Charles's succinct and damning description (from the first edition, 1945; the revised edition, 1960, has one slight though interesting change): I turned into some of the halls of the ship, which were huge without any splendour, as though they had been designed for a railway coach and preposterously magnified. I passed through vast bronze gates whose ornament was like the trade mark of a cake of soap which had been used once or twice; I trod carpets the colour of blotting paper; the painted panels of the walls were like blotting paper, too; kindergarten work in flat, drab colours: and between the walls were yards and yards of biscuit-coloured wood which no carpenter's tool had ever touched, wood that had been bent round corners, invisibly joined strip to strip, steamed and squeezed and polished; all over the blotting-paper carpet were strewn tables designed perhaps by a sanitary engineer, square blocks of stuffing, with square holes for sitting in, and upholstered, it seemed, in blotting paper also; the light of the hall was suffused from scores of hollows, giv­ ing an even glow, casting no shadows-the whole place hummed from its hundred ventilators and vibrated with the turn of the great engines below.