Evelyn Waugh (1903—1966) is one of my favorite comic novelists. His prose is clean and elegant and tempered—which takes his cynicism and savagery to a level that few satirists, if any, have ever achieved. (At the moment, Saki’s the only other author that comes to mind.) Sadly, Waugh’s not too well known in America. And most of those who do know of him, it seems, know him best for his most famous book, Brideshead Revisited, which (coincidentally or not) also happens to be one of his least comic novels. It’s not much of a comedy at all, really. Which is why it might be, given his incredible gift for satire, my least favorite of his early works. Regardless of its great literary merit.
The real money books, in my opinion, are four that he published prior to BR:
- Decline and Fall (1928)
- Black Mischief (1932)
- A Handful of Dust (1934)
- Put Out More Flags (1942)
With Decline and Fall being the best of the four, and A Handful of Dust as the close second. (Though Put Out More Flags, however terribly it fails as a novel, may be his funniest.)
Here’s the thing about Waugh’s humor, which may explain why it’s more appreciated in England than it is in America: it’s plain cruel. It’s unabashedly mean. It’s downright vicious. While none of his characters are ever completely innocent, half of them are inevitably and unjustly tripped up—even killed—by bizarre circumstances, while the remaining half treat the pains of the former half with either aristocratic indifference or, better, something akin to mild amusement mixed with distaste. Take an early scene in his first novel, Decline and Fall, for example. Set in a second-tier English public boy’s school, the students are herded about, forced to participate in “sport” before their aloof upper-class parents, by a band of idiot schoolmasters. One of those teachers, the wheedling Mr. Prendergast, drunk off one drink, is given the role of Starter—which he carries out using not a starting pistol, but an old WWI service revolver:
“I shall say, ‘Are you ready? one, two, three!’ and then fire,” said Mr. Pendergast. ”Are you ready? One”—there was a terrific report. ”Oh, dear! I’m sorry”—but the race had begun. Clearly Tangent was not going to win; he was sitting on the grass crying because he had been wounded in the foot by Mr. Pendergast’s bullet. Philbrick carried him, wailing dismally, into the refreshment tent, where Dingy helped him off with his shoe. His heel was slightly grazed. Dingy gave him a large slice of cake, and he hobbled out surrounded by a sympathetic crowd.
“That won’t hurt him,” said [Tangent's mother,] Lady Circumference, “but I think some one ought to remove the pistol from that old man before he does anything serious.”
“I knew that was going to happen,” said Lord Circumference.
“A most unfortunate beginning,” said the Doctor.
“Am I going to die?” said Tangent, his mouth full of cake.
“For God’s sake, look after Prendy,” said Grimes in Paul’s ear. “The man’s as tight as a lord, and on one whisky, too.”
“First blood to me!” said Mr. Predergast gleefully.
“The last race will be run again,” said Paul down the megaphone. ”Starter, Mr. Philbrick; time-keeper, Mr. Predergast.”
It would be one thing if poor Tangent were only shot on the foot. But as the novel runs its course, we’re given updates on his state of his appendage—which runs from “grazed” to “infected” to “gangrenous” to “in need of etherless amputation” (cut to a scene where two characters are peevishly annoyed by the incivility of Tangent’s shrieks as his leg’s being sawed off in the nearby infirmary). Until, finally, near the end of the novel, we read a cast-off reference to the boy’s cold, whimpering death.
In these early novels, Waugh’s characters roughly fall into two categories: scoundrels and idiots. The most glorious example of the former—a character which may, arguably, be the most hilarious scoundrel ever—is Basil Seal, who features as a main character in both Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags. I could write (and probably should write) a full post on why I think Basil Seal deserves the prize for “biggest bastard in English literature,” but I’ll only say this: any character that comes home to England in good spirits after discovering that, during his last African meal, he unwittingly dined on the woman he’d been making love with for the past year, and then unrepentantly uses the paranoia of pre-WWII England to frame an old friend as a fascist for the sake of gaining a cushy promotion to Captain and taking over the same friend’s spacious and well-located London apartment, deserves some special recognition.
Really, how did Waugh think up such scenes, such swine? And how did he make them, in addition to being dark, funny, and dynamic—so living?
I think the answer lies in Waugh himself.
When I took Ethics in college, to illustrate why tempered philosophers feel confident in their ability to define and outline guidelines for the best to live among all ways of living, a professor once asked our class: “In medicine, do we think a doctor who’s suffered malaria is better at treating patients with malaria?” The obvious answer: No, he isn’t. If both are trained equally, and given access to the same medicine, it makes no difference. Same, it goes, with the philosopher of morality: one doesn’t need to have lived heinously to decry what constitutes a heinous mode of living. A variation of this question is also, on occasion, asked of writers: “In literature, does an author need to experience x to write on the subject of x.” Here it gets a bit tricky.
The author, if he’s doing things right, I think, creates a world atop a world. There’s the first world, the foundation. In this world rests images and tastes and touch: the setting. But more than just the setting: all inanimate objects that are used or made or destroyed throughout the story. Atop this layer, and interacting with the bottom layer, is the world of characters.
Now the bottom world is something that I feel can be conjured up, in many cases, if the author’s imagination is good, from thin air. In this case, to answer the question, “Does the author need to experience x to write on the subject of x?” I would say, probably, if the author is any decent: no, probably not. Kafka wrote about America without traveling to America. H.G. Wells wrote “The Land of the Blind” without either a) being blind, or b) traveling through the Andes. Borges built his Library of Babel using nothing but imaginative extrapolation.
On the other hand, creating and sustaining character is something much different. Returning quickly to Borges: somewhere (I forget where), he wrote that authors can do anything but create a believable character that’s either more intelligent or having more expansive a morality as the author himself. I like this notion of morality and intelligence as both vessels—measurements of authorial capacity. I think Borges, in making this connection, was spot on. It explains for me, having gotten to know a bit about Waugh’s personal life, how Waugh can write like Waugh.
It also, I think, goes further—to explain why some of the greatest writers and artists are also some of the world’s absolute worst people. I don’t need to bore you with a list of malcontents and degenerates that top the ranks. Too many to mention. Just consider this: Borges doesn’t confine his morality to one morality; rather, he implies that the souls of all men may be open to any number of varying moral systems—systems which might (echoing Nietzsche, maybe), be in conflict with one another, at any given time, within the prison of one man’s soul. As a person, one’s capacity to harbor varying moralities may inevitably lead to disastrous results—but as an author, this capacity allows one the ability to tap into both the highest and lowest modes of human behavior, keep those modes in play throughout an extended period, and play the modes off one another. In short, for the author, discounting the effects it may have upon his personal life, it’s a clear boon.
What I’m getting around to (sluggishly) is this: maybe the ability to write comedy well is, in some ways—to affirm Woody Allen’s observation that the capacity to write good humor seems more akin to a freak genetic mutation than a skill—inherent: it’s all from the comic’s unconscious jumble of rivaling systems of morality that bump and collide off each other, all while constantly referencing—neurotically keeping at the fore of one’s mind—a deep sense of what constitutes the conventional morality of the day.
So how does this tie back to Waugh?
Well, honestly, this was all just a tedious setup to a strong film recommendation: whether you know Waugh or not, I strongly suggest you watch this hilarious BBC documentary that I recently watched on YouTube. It’s a multi-generational biography of the Waugh family—a full four (possibly five) generations of brilliant, strong, witty writers, with Evelyn—both the best of them all, and the biggest bastard of them all—at the very top of the pack, in terms of talent. I think it does an excellent job at illustrating, by showing the complex and often paradoxical nature of Evelyn’s character, how Waugh wrote like Waugh.
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