Waugh Revisited
By MALCOLM BRADBURY
MUCH of the literary criticism that has been written on the fiction of Evelyn Waugh has complained, in one way or another, about the author's snobbery or his distrust of total democracy. One of the sharpest of these attacks occurs in `Donat O'Donnell's' onor Cruise O'Brien's) Maria Cross, in which book Waugh is attacked for linking the history of the Catholic faith in England with a fixed and intolerant mythology about the English upper classes. More recently, Frank Kermode has taken that line of argument a step further, discerning in Waugh's Work a view of the world and its history centred upon a notion of a Catholic-aristocratic saving remnant. Other critics-like Philip Toynbee, and more latterly Simon Raven, writing in the pages of this journal-have quite simply felt that Waugh draws too readily on the snobbish instincts of his readers, and have attacked his 'idiosyn- cratic Toryism.' And it's probably true to say that, in the insistently egalitarian atmosphere of the post-war period-which has remarkably suc- ceeded in severing itself intellectually from the class-bound orientations of the preceding years- Waugh's critical reputation has diminished, and largely for this single reason.
It took a profile article in the New Statesman to point out that Waugh uses his snobbery very obliquely in his fiction, and that his pronounce- ments on public matters are vastly cOmie and ambiguous in tone. For Waugh is, after all, a cOmic writer, one of the best we have; what is more, he is, I think, a man with a deep con- ception of the comic, and a place for it in his conception of living. He deals in a world of ironies. Clearly his novels are set largely in an Upper-middle-class world, verging on the aristo- cratic; they are much concerned with hereditary distinctions, great estates, and high style in living. Waugh can invest the loss of these things With great pathos; but the novels are usually about their loss, and he can perceive these dis- Possessions largely from outside. The early and the late novels don't differ much in this respect; in the Second World War trilogy, for instance, Crouchback is not vindicated. He lives in a world of heroic delusions and false quests, and must finally compromise and surrender, as Tony Last surrendered. Waugh's novels aren't concerned With retreat into the safe Catholic citadel; he is deeply concerned, as a comic visionary, in the forces of comic anarchy which threaten and destroy. In Pin fold the anarchy is turned inward, and it virtually engulfs the stylised dandyish self that Pinfold-Waugh has adopted to protect, re- member, his modesty.
It is, I think, because Waugh can give so much to the notion of a contingent and debased world in which comic anarchy operates that he is so important a twentieth-century writer. Certainly, too, he has been a vast influence upon the form of comic fictioh, which has been a much more important form in this century than in almost any other, precisely because this sense of con- tingency and anarchy is so familiar to our ex- perience. Critics often try to distinguish between the early and the late Waugh-the early Waugh being the comic writer who sees, with great ob- jectivity, a comic modern world, that of the Twenties, and the late Waugh being the Catholic snob. It is an inefficient division; it is possible to discern the snobbery (if that is one's primary critical business) in Decline and Fall, possible to discern Waugh's remarkable attentiveness to the modern and fashionable in his most recent fic- tion. Always Waugh has been fascinated, in his fiction, by the past and by the manifestations of the present; upon such conflicts, to different extents, all his novels are based.
And how that Waugh has undertaken an ex- tensive autobiography, the first volume of which has just appeared,* the culture out of which these conflicts emerged should grow more apparent. A Little Learning, which takes Waugh's life as far as his unhappy ventures in schoolmastering after leaving Oxford, is a fully reminiscent, rather reticent, low-keyed volume. The publishers draw the comparison with Waugh's biography of Ronald Knox, and rightly; it is written with high elegance and a good deal of self-irony, but apart from the passage in which Waugh gives a de- lightful account of his schoolmastering experi- ence, it isn't a book to remind us that Waugh is one of the great comic writers. Rather it shows him living in the context of a culture to which his comedy must be seen as a perplexed response.
Waugh lived through his early years in an atmosphere of fairly well-endowed, but not ele- gant, upper-middle-class suburban London life. Arthur Waugh, his father, was a man of letters, a lover of cricket, an essayist, and managing director of the publishing firm of Chapman and Hall. In the family were literary connections (Gosse was related), ecclesiastical connections (various clergymen), and distant aristocratic con- nections (the Cockburn family); but what here seems to predominate was a vaguely agrarian cesthetie atmosphere common among the well- rooted intelligentsia of the day, the atmosphere of Pre-Raphaelitism plus cricket. Arthur Waugh found his sons 'modern' and disturbing, but Evelyn Waugh clearly assimilated much of this culture. Because of his religious interests he was sent to Lancing, a Woodward foundation; but what was fostered was rather dilettantism and iestheticism. He had a great interest in art, pen- manship, and the development of great personal style; and these interests continued at Oxford. Oxford was undergoing a period in which the idea of -the xsthete was again much in currency.
The ideal of the dandy had by no means died out, however, and Waugh's fascination with both the modern and the reactionary takes much of its tone from this situation. Waugh was politically relatively unaware; he professed Conservatism, but, as Harold Acton points out, he was close in many ways -to the spirit of William Morris. /Estheticism and dandyism afford a style of prejudice and narrowed artistic commitment in periods of confusion; and a conspicuous avoid- ance of the intellectual and the political seems to characterise Waugh's later schooldays and his undergraduate career. Craftsmanship takes on a positive value. But the world tends to be without system and meaning, to be, rather, full of ironies; after the loss of his strong religious interests, Waugh would appear to have lived in a passive agnosticism until, after the close of this volume, he became a Catholic, when faith assuaged but did not relieve his sense of the contingent nature of the world.
About the work that derives from this, Waugh says'very little. Presumably the next volume will concern his decision to become a writer; all he does is to point the way by suggesting that it was the one thing for which his education fitted him. But to remind us of what these days of little learning brought about, his publishers have brought out a new edition of Scoop.f This is the latest in a number of re-issues of the novels; Waugh's work has suffered considerably from misprints, and the new editions have revised -and in some cases altered-texts. One might add that A Little Learning is not without a fair share of misprints.
* A LFITLE LEARNING: THE FIRST VOLUME OF AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. By Evelyn Waugh. (Chapman and Hall, 30s.) t SCOOP (New Edition). By Evelyn Waugh. (Chap- man and Hall, 21s.)
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