THE MATURING OF EVELYN WAUGH by Ann McCaskey Hitt A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Humanities in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida December 1988 THE MATURING OF EVELYN WAUGH by Ann McCaskey Hitt This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. William Coyle, Department of English, and has been approved by the members of her supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the College of Humanities and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE KLL~ LJ ) j~/ v Department of English ~ ~ "'- \( UMJn:rt J Dean, College of Humanities l t /z.. z. I r:1. Dean for Advanced Studies Date I I i i Abstract Author: Ann McCaskey Hitt Title: The Maturing of Evelyn Waugh Institution: Florida Atlantic University Degree: Master of Arts Year: 1988 Evelyn Waugh began his literary career soon after the end of World War II ~hen the lif2 style he had kno~n all his life, that of the upper class and the aristocratic, ~as soon to be over. He was distressed at the loss of his world to the modern age. His early works are bitter satires attacking the changes he sa~ in the people he knew and the world he loved. His first protagonists were flat shallow characters who were totally una~are of the havoc of their world. As Waugh matured, his characters changed and became more realistic and better able to cope with the problems in their lives. The protagonists of the later novels are fully developed and manage their l1ves very well even though the ~orld is still in a chaotic state. As Waugh matured, he was belter able to contend with the problems he faced, and this maturity is reflected in the protagonists of his novels. i i i Table of Contents Chapter I Introduction . 1 Chapter II The Early Novels ............10 Chapter III Brideshead Revisited .......... 21 Chapter IV The War Trilogy ............. 34 Chapter V Conclusion •............... 56 Works Cited . 58 iv Chapter I Introduction Immediately following the first World War dramatic changes took place in the life-styles of England, especially in the aristocratic and upper classes. The results of higher taxes, t h 0 breakdown of the class system, the start of what is called the modern age, and the beginning of the breakup of the British Empi re along with the attendant political chaos are the situations with which Evelyn Waugh deals in his novels. There was also a degree of chaos in Waugh's personal life: he was unable to establish himself in a career after he left Oxford without earning his degree; his wife deserted him; and i n his search for the traditional way of life he had known when h e was young and a security he could depend on, he joined the Roma n Catholic Church. Waugh also uses the old structures in which his characters live and visit to create anchors for their lives as well as his own. In each of the novels under consideration there are structures described, and for the most part they are architecturally significant. Waugh draws a clear picture of th ~ houses or hotels and sometimes the surrounding landscape, and a ~ he develops his characters they are placed in relationship to t h e 1 2 structures. He especially admires ancient houses that represent tradition and resistance to change. The protagonists in his novels reflect the chaos Waugh felt as they deal with the problems England and Waugh faced at the time. Among the problems are the attitudes of the men who run Oxford toward those students who are not well connected and are not wealthy; the bigotry of the public school system; the prison system; marriage; the Anglican church; and The Bright Young People, young people who were totally unaware of the world around them. The early novels have flat protagonists who are not permitted to solve the problems created by the situations in which they find themselves, they deal only with the crises of the moment. Waugh puts his characters in the real world of upper class England in the 1920s and 1930s, in situations over which they had little or no control, and their lack of control destroyed their fortunes, their morals, and their mores. In the later novels the protagonists are permitted to make choices that determine their roles in the performances Waugh presents. The men are liars, cheats, thieves, adulterers, fornicators, and bigamists; the women with whom these men associate are little better than prostitutes. As Waugh matured, his protagonists were given tighter control of their lives, and these changes in the protagonists' attitudes show the change in Waugh's thoughts and a maturity in his attitudes. When a comparison is made between Waugh's treatment of the protagonists in the novels written in the 1940s and the protagonists of the early novels of the late 1920s and 1930s his change in attitude is quite clear. Waugh's novels are written in bitter satire and cruel irony and he shows his rejection of the modern age. His writings set up situations that are quitt normal, such as teaching school or taking a ferry from France to England or attending church on Sunday. He peopled these scenes with characters whose outlook and actions are decadent, and at times obscene, and he indicates that the results of their actions are caused by a series of unseen forces or by their own foolishness. In his early work, especially the first novels, Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, and A Handful of Dust, Waugh makes no positive statement for the possibility of accommodation to the reality of the new world. As he matured as an artist, as a writer, and as a man, his later novels-- Brideshead Revisited and the war trilogy, Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and The End of the Battle--became less bitter; and he took a position that admitted compromise and permitted hope. He never lost sight of his vision of the world returned to the solid social tradition of his boyhood and made a continuing cry against moral bankruptcy. In the three early novels being considered, Waugh hammers home his ideas of the breakdown of the upper class as he knows it. He is funny, at times hilarious, but there is always an undercurrent of bitterness even in the most comic 4 scenes. Not much in the lives of these people is sacred to Waugh. His first novels attacked "The decay o f a civilization, futile sensuality leading to boredom, [and] the poverty of spiritual life" (Carens 13) and Waugh puts his characters into plots that involve seemingly normal people whose reactions to pain, death, and all human horror border on indifference and incoherence. The protagonists in the early novels, Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall, Adam Fenwick-Symes in Vile Bodies, and Tony Last in A Handful of Dust, are victims of the circumstances of their lives; only Tony Last is a real anti-hero. The other two, Paul and Adam, have a bit of their former lives left in the end. Paul has gone back to Oxford, and although he lost his love, he does have another opportunity to make his life as he wants it. Adam has another chance also. He has lost Nina, the girl he tries to marry throughout Vile Bodies, but he is alive and he does get his money from his drunken major although its value has fallen because of inflation. At the end he is on a battlefield with a war going on in the distance, but he is alive and unhurt. However, Tony is lost in the jungles of Brazil with no hope of rescue. He has lost everything, his home, his family, and whatever fortune he may have had. There is no pattern or destination in the lives of these three protagonists. From the first, Waugh's novels achieved critical and popular acclaim. Decline and Fall, pub l ished i n 1928, 5 eventually ran to "six hard-back editions of approximately 2000 copies each by 1931," and this book established Waugh's "reputation as a bright young author .... Vile Bodies, published in 1930, was an instant success and secured Waugh's position as a ... writer'' (Stannard 14-15). A Handful of Dust ''is now regarded as Waugh's masterpiece"; however, at the time of publication in 1934 it received good reviews, "but the extraordinary power of the work and its superiority to Waugh's earlier fiction was not widely recognized." Stannard suggests that A Handful of Dust may have lost some of its initial power and impact when it first appeared because it was first published in serial form in "five monthly installments in Harper's Bazaar in both Britain and America" (21). The first novels were received by the critics with joyous laughter. Gerald Gould in the Observer for September 23, 1928, said of Decline and Fall that Waugh "is a critic of life, whose weapon is the joke disguised as the simple statement" (Stannard 81); and J.M.S.G. in Cherwell, October 28, 1928 said, "A genuinely new humorist has presented himself in the person of Evelyn Waugh, whose Decline and Fall is an uncompromising and brilliantly malicious satire" (Stannard 82). Of Vile Bodies, Ralph Straus, in Bystander, for January 15, 1930, said: "I cannot conceive of a droller or more cunning or more subtly ironical commentary on the juvenile absurdities of today.