PATTERNS IN THE MOSAIC:
EVELYN WAUGH’S FICTION
Dr. D. S. KESAVA RAO
Evelyn Waugh has at once been acclaimed as an accomplished writer of a remarkable stature and also labelled as a frivolous entertainer. These two attitudes typify the two extremes of critical responses to Waugh’s fiction. His work has invited a good deal of scholarly discussion and even controversy. Waugh is of special interest to students of modern fiction in view of the varied critical reception he has received which continues even today. His novels cover an impressive time span of over half a century. Critical in sights and props spanning more than four decades and the intrinsic worth of Waugh’s fiction justify a close look at this intricate mosaic.
Evelyn Waugh is a prolific writer whose output includes fourteen nove1s, beginning with Decline and Fall in 1928 and ending as late as in 1961 with Unconditional Surrender, besides some stories, a number of travelogues journals, numerous diaries, notes, and letters. It is the object of the present study to confine itself to his novels. Sufficiently complex, urbane and polished, his novels make fascinating reading. They represent various levels of artistry, A Handful of Dust being hailed as a minor classic and Brideshead Revisited generally regarded his masterpiece. Waugh exhibited a remarkable talent for satire, wit, and humor and in a sudden shift to the ‘serious’ proves almost equally, if not entirely, adroit. His fiction is usually classified into two phases. In his early phase, Waugh ruthlessly laid threadbare the follies of the British society of his times; accordingly, the early novels sparkle with a rare freshness, savagely amusing satire and flashes of wit Decline and fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, Scoop, A Handful of Dust and Put out more Flags, by common consent, fall into this early phase. The later works testify to a more balanced outlook on life with religion playing a predominant role; Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One, Helena, the War trilogy consisting of Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender, and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold belong to this category.
The sheer variety of Waugh’s subject matter and the rather dramatic departure from his early, and undoubtedly more popular, manner has occasioned varied estimates of his work. While some critics maintain that Waugh’s achievement is unique and that he belongs in the great tradition of the English novel others contend that his works lack consistency, a hallmark of all truly great artists, and that he is a mere “entertainer”. This, then, leads us to the crucial question of Waugh’s place among the literary figures of England. He has been admitted to be a better artist than Huxley and Ronald Firbank, with both of whom he has some affinities, but he cannot, at the same time, be bracketed with such accomplished writers like Joyce, Forester and Lawrence. A consummate artist, Waugh has created fiction of lasting merit. Satirist, moralist, dandy, entertainer, social chronicler, religious novelist, an incurable romantic idealizing a lost past, staunch supporter of the aristocracy-these are some of the labels that are usually associated with Waugh. Of these, perhaps the most damaging is “entertainer” which amounts to a stigma. Those who relegate his early works to the background as ‘minor’ and devote exclusive attention to Brideshead Revisited and the war trilogy are no less guilty than those who regard the early satires as his most mature work and dismiss the later novels as too didactic, sentimental and artistically inferior. Is Waugh, then, adept only at mirroring the absurdities of the late Twenties and Thirties in a comic vein? Does not his work offer anything of lasting value? There are the questions that crop up inevitably during an evaluation of Waugh and the answers to these key questions reflect the critics’ own powers of perception and analysis.
It may not be out of place to discuss here briefly the social, moral and spiritual condition of England which the novels of Waugh depict with such power and clarity. The writers of the Twenties and Thirties transmuted into art their own view of the modern English society, both in fiction and poetry. T. S. Eliot in his The Waste Land gave quintessential expression to the disgust and disillusionment with a decayed society which he shared with a host of other writers. Such prominent writers of fiction like Joyce, Forester, Lawrence, and Viriginia Woolf expressed their radical dissatisfaction with society and in the process turned the English novels into “the most sensitive artistic register of contemporary experience.” A close reading of Waugh’s fiction reveals an intense and pervading sense of futility and sterility in the political life of the nation, in the institution of the family, in the relation between sexes and in the spiritual condition of his characters. The brilliant early satires of Waugh for all their polished, hard exterior, underline the chaos, anarchy and the corrosive ennui of the modern times. In the words of G. S. Fraser, Waugh’s novels are among those works written superficially in terms of comedy or even farce, but with an underlying very disturbing note of bitterness which emphasised the ruthlessness, the nerviness, the unhappiness, the lack of purpose and the lack of love in much contemporary British life.”2
Not only does a cursory reading of Waugh’s novels suggest a quest for permanence, which Waugh believes only religion can offer, but a good number of his characters are directly involved in a quest for the meaning and, purpose of life. Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall, Adam in Vile Bodies and Tony Last in A Handful of Dust, to mention only a few of Waugh’s protagonists, undertake journeys, both literal and metaphorical but till the end remain unenlightened. It is interesting that they have only a vague notion of their objectives which is in tune with their dehumanized and spiritually impoverished state. This is not to say that Waugh’s protagonists never succeed in their search, but, as Jeffrey Heath aptly observes, “It is not until Brideshead Revisited and the novels that follow it that Waugh’s personae begin to find their purposes in life. Their discoveries parallel Waugh’s own realisation that he had been a failure as a man of action and reflect his decision to devote himself to the more withdrawn calling of the Christian artist. Like Waugh, Charles Ryder rejects the army and secular art in favour of representing “man in relation to God”. After a long and uneventful life, Helena learns that the one deed which she and no one else can perform is the discovery of the cross. And the saga of Guycrouchback depicts his retreat from the romantic role of crusader into the more modest calling of pious pater-families.”3 He regards Waugh’s fiction as “-------- a quest for sanctuary and ‘unique achievement’ manifested in a see-saw contest between art and action.” 4
Evelyn Waugh’s comic inventiveness and his innate satirical genius combine to invest his novels with a unique charm. And yet it is generally agreed that no writer, however great, can fashion his style without in some way borrowing, consciously or otherwise, the matter and manner of either his contemporaries or predecessors. The same is true of Evelyn Waugh’s fiction in the sense that one discerns the influence of T. S. Eliot to a remarkable extent.
In his critical study of Huxley’s novels, Jerome Meckier says: “The influence of T. S. Eliot’s poetry on the satiric novels of the 1920s and the 1930s has never been sufficiently stressed. In Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934), the title of which comes from The Waste Land, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), and in Antic Hay (1923), past and present are ludicrously contrasted and characters are dwarfed by roles their ancestors played with ease.”5 The other major influences on Waugh are Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Ronald Firbank, and Dickens. Huxley’s despairing comedies of the twenties resemble Waugh’s own in many ways, but especially is this affinity more obvious in their choice of themes. His Those Barren Leaves, in its effective parodies of Dickensian situation, is reminiscent of Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and in countless ways After Many a Summer Dies the Swan anticipates The Loved one (1948) of Waugh. However, Waugh carefully avoids the Menippean satire, that is to say, an emphasis on an ironic attitude, which pervades the works of both Huxley and Wyndham Lewis. Graham Greene has long been associated with Evelyn Waugh, the similarity being obvious. Both have attempted to revive the Catholic novel with, of course, varying degrees of success. Both believed that suffering is preferable to pleasure and that badness rather than goodness brings one closer to God. Further, both concur that religious beliefs must be trumpeted. If Greene is better than Waugh at embodying grit and violence, Waugh has excelled at animating and consoling the world.
Some mention must be made of his techniques. Here one encounters a major challenge which has perplexed Waugh’s admirers and detractors alike. Being a perfectionist, Waugh lavished great care on the structure of his works. And it is a tribute to his structural skill that no where is this elaborate effort revealed. Waugh is rated as one of the best craftsmen with an uncanny sense of tone and phrase. Waugh’s early novels are surreal fantasticated, and ostensibly amoral, but on the figurative level they are parables about freedom, servitude, and vocation.” Waugh began on the classical lines with detachment and objectivity. To convey the chaos and decay of the modem world and the collapse of civilisation, which form his central themes., Waugh makes use of the elements of farce, burlesque, fantasy, satire, irony and caricature. Like Greene, Waugh, too, is influenced by the filmic techniques. The absurd and the outrageous and presented literally. As David Lodge observes: “One might say that the technique of Waugh’s early novels is metonymic in an experimental way like Virginia Woolf s “Jacob’s Room”, but applying the methods she used to the purposes of comedy. Waugh deletes from and rearranges the contiguous elements of his subject to introduce absurd and ironic incongruities - Agatha Runcible coming down to breakfast at No. 10. Downing street dressed in a Hawaiian grass skirt, for instance: or Basic Seal unwittingly eating his girlfriend Prudence at a cannibal feast; or Tony Last reading Dickens aloud at gun-point in the depths of the South American jungle. But the imaginative idea which lies behind and unifies the narrative is often quasi-metaphorical in a way that reminds us of modernist writing. The title Decline and Fall hints at an analogy between modern Western society and the late Roman Empire, Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of dust (1935) and Scoop (1938) all turn upon ironic parallels between civilisation and barbarism - the social jungle of London compared with the real jungle of South America or tropical Africa. Ironic comparisons and cross references between these different milieu are accompanied by a cinematic technique of cross cutting between short scenes often occurring simultaneously in different places - like Greene and Isherwood, Waugh was deeply influenced by the cinema.” 7
Evelyn Waugh’s counterpoint technique is largely modelled on that of Ronald Firbank who made an important contribution to the structure of the novel. In his perceptive study of the satiric elements in Waugh’s fiction, James Carens observes; “Firbank’s objectivity and detachment, the counterpoint or montage technique which was his essential mode of presentation, the subtlety of his dialogue, which proceeds through under statements, suggestive emphasis, and sly innuendo, the inventiveness of his comic devices, provided the young Waugh with a model for an economical, destructive, and nondidactic satire” 8 Waugh dispenses with the cause - and effect relationship which characterises so much of the nineteenth - century fiction. He also reduces narration and description to a bare minimum and develops his novels through a series of vignettes rather than a coherent action. It is left for the reader to piece together, as much as he can, of the meaning of each novel. Waugh does not hesitate, like Aldous Huxley, to employ ingenu satire, an ancient satiric mode, occasionally in his novels.
In his later works, Waugh minimises farce and extravagance in preference to probability and verisimilitude. Brideshead Revisited and the war trilogy are conventional in the sense that Waugh here follows the fortunes of a group of interrelated characters, and they are labelled by Carens as “a satirical blend of novel and romance”. Significantly, Waugh uses a first-person narrator for the first time in Work suspended which marks the beginning of his later style. The much-criticised latter style is subjective, allusive and sentimental. It is common critical practice to dismiss the later work as a “failure”, and to assert that Waugh’s art suffers when he discards his comic mask. However, this has been debated frequently.
Critics have been baffled by Waugh’s keen delight in the rogues and dissolutes and the Bright young things. Is Waugh then a mere chronicler of the Younger Generation? Malcolm Bradbury is of the view that Waugh writes “Social chronicle and fantasy in a spirit of comic delight that absolves him from consistent moral representation. Like Dickens, Waugh seems to work by the scene of the chapter with emphasis on the comic possibilities of each situation. “His novels are, in this sense, anti-novels, violating traditional expectations, engaging extensively in mock-heroic or burlesque or parody passages, driven forward by a comic delight. In a more recent analysis, James F.Carens echos Bradbury’s view: “Throughout the first stage of his career, (Waugh) offers only the most fleeting glimpses into a positive and affirmative standard. Not until Brideshead Revisited in which his catholicism is revealed for the first time, does a positive force significantly emerge to oppose everything that the novelist rejects. The early novels remain generally negative and destructive, and; consequently, Waugh is criticised for lacking a high moral purpose and writing satire without a moral centre.” 10 To argue that Waugh approves of the wild and irresponsible figures who people his fictional world is to lose sight of his very purpose in writing these novels. Jeffrey Heath, writing in 1982, explains the central contradiction in waugh’s fiction thus:” But to argue that Waugh is “Wholly delighted” at the idiocies he records is to be deaf to a constant undertone of censure, surely the truth is that Waugh disapproves of what delights him and is fascinated by that he deplores. It is this ambivalence which provides the very germ and matrix of his art. Waugh is not outside the satiric tradition of Jonathan Swift; on the contrary, he is firmly within it.” 11
1 David Lodge, “Novelist at crossroads”. (London: Routledge and Paul, 1971), p.25.
2 G. S. Fraser, The Modem writer and His World. (London: Andre Deutche, 1955) p. 99.
3 Jeffrey Heath, Evelyn Waugh, The Picturesque Prison. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), p. 9.
4 Ibid, p. 270.
5 Jerome Meckier, Aldous Huxley, Satire and Structure, (London:Chatto and Windus, 1969), p. 67.
6 JeffreyHeath, Evelyn Waugh, The Picturesque Prison, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982) P. 121.
7 David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing, (London: Edward Arnold, 1977) p. 212.
8 James F. Carens, The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh, (Seattle and London, University of Washington Press, 1966), P. 10.
9. James F. Carens The satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh, p. xii
10 James F. Carens, p. 7011. Jeffrey Heath, Evelyn Waugh, The Picturesque Prison, p. 58