BOOKS
Waugh's Private Wars
By SIMON RAVEN
TN 1961, when the publication of Unconditional 'Surrender at long last completed Evelyn Waugh's trilogy about the Second World War, it seemed to me that the following comments were called for. First, this was the story of a pilgrimage : the hero, Guy Crouchback, answered the call to arms with high hopes for himself and his country (in that order); he later came, at the time when Crete fell and seeming champions were revealed as men of straw, to disillusionment and even despair; and he finally hauled himself out of the Slough of Despond by his own boot- laces, having discovered that honour might be in good part retrieved by private acts of mercy or of grace. Secondly (I should have said in 1961), alt three volumes were immaculately written and constructed. Thirdly, the understand- ing of martial custom and procedure was such as to encompass, with irony, brio or dignity as appropriate, any eventuality from wholesale catastrophe to barrack-room farce. Lastly, and in sum, this was a major work of fiction, dis- figured only by certain wilful eccentricities which had to do with politics and the Church of Rome.
Three years have now passed since I formed these judgments, and the appearance of a Penguin edition* of the trilogy (an edition remarkable, especially at the beginning of the third volume, for vile misprints) invites one to read, and to think, again. Having done so, I find that my original assessment still stands, but stands shakily; what before seemed only minor com- plaints have now become serious and sometimes fundamental objections.
Take the beginning of the whole work. We are given, in a few pages, a shrewd insight into Crouchback and his discontent, a glowing im- pression of the old order to which he belongs, and a very funny description of the Italian vil- lage to which he has exiled himself; we are also shown how the trumpet call which summons him to battle turns his discontent to aspiration, and we see him going to ask a farewell blessing on his pilgrimage at the tomb of Roger of Way- broke, an English Crusader who had been killed in the service of the local robber-baron: The Count gave [Sir Roger] honourable burial and there he had lain through the cen- turies, while the church crumbled and was re- built above him, far from Jerusalem, far from Waybroke, a man with a great journey still all before him and a great vow unfulfilled; but the people of Santa Dulcina delle Rocce . . . adopted Sir Roger and despite all clerical remonstrance canonised him, brought him their troubles and touched his sword for luck, so that its edge was always bright. . . . [Crouch- back] ran his finger, as the fishermen did, along the knight's sword. 'Sir Roger, pray for me,' he said, 'and for our endangered kingdom.'
So, shriven and dedicated, Crouchback starts his journey, has an amusing argument with a fascist * MEN AT ARMS. OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN. UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER. By Evelyn Waugh. (Penguin, 3s. 6d. each) but unbellicose taxi-driver, and arrives in London to be greeted by wary friends, who are busy calculating what's in the war for them.
The perfect prologue, one would have said. Rich, funny, lyrical, but always with an uneasy element of warning, it introduces the hero and his situation with economy and ease. And yet even here, even before Crouchback has left Italy, there are strong hints of the sheer silliness which is to recur so often and mar so much. There is the impertinent, the grotesque presumption which proclaims on the very first page the superior quality and virtues of the old recusant families; there is an indication that Sir Roger is something more than a symbol, that he is indeed in a position, somewhere, somehow, to grant petitions, to influence events; there is more than a suggestion that what Crouchback will righteously resist is not merely Nazism but the whole apparatus of modern and secular progress as promoting religious apostasy and social change—two calamities which Mr. Waugh does not, it is true, equate but sees as intimately con- nected.
And when we reach England with Crouch- back, such absurdities obtrude themselves even more grossly. Leave aside further factious pedantry about the old Catholic families (as represented, this time, by Crouchback's saintly and senile father) and yet further officious preachment about the efficacy of the Roman Faith, we find a peevish disregard, sometimes an outright discourtesy, displayed whenever any- one is mentioned, citizen or soldier, who is not of gentle or armigerous rank. (An exception, I should add, is made in favour of faithful servants.) The lowest social stratum to be treated with serious attention is that comprising the middle-class officers of the Halberdiers, the un- smart but valorous regiment into which Crouch- back is commissioned; beneath that level, except for a few loyal warrant officers, the nation apparently consists at best of mindless cannon- fodder, at worst of whining and mutinous malingerers.
Now, heaven knows that some of the `demo- cratic' attitudes current during the war were quite insufferable and that Mr. Waugh had good cause to be irritated by them: but it is futile to counter nonsense with another brand of non- sense, to react with dogma or violence. The people of England fought and fought bravely— a proposition which, in the abstract, Mr. Waugh would certainly allow, but which he cannot seem to apply to any `common' person within his own or his novel's immediate compass. He ab- jures sweet reason for personal rancour, and the result is that, in so far as he proceeds outside the ranks of gentility, his picture is false.
What is worse, even when Mr. Waugh is operating on his ohosen ground, that of `officers and gentlemen,' he often has recourse to sleight of hand or caricature. The former he uses to assist the plot or, as one sees now, to camouflage some highly implausible twists of military
machination; for one of the things revealed by re-reading these books is that Mr. Waugh's grasp of the Army's methods is by no means as sound as one had thought. The tricks he plays, which are ingenious and exceedingly funny (e.g. Jumbo Trotter's excursion, or the apotheosis of Trimmer), would be very acceptable as occasional light relief; the trouble is that they are so frequent as almost to form a staple of the narrative, a state of affairs undesirable in what purports to be—what is—a serious cruvre. As for the other suspect technique, that of caricature, this is used in part unconsciously, as when Mr. Waugh is inflating the excellence of Catholics and gentlemen, in part quite shame- lessly, as when he seeks to discredit their Com- munist and American foes.
Once again, of course, one sees what Mr. Waugh is at. So much tedious propaganda once exalted the gallantry of the partisan, the sterling simplicity of the GI, that it is a relief to be reminded of the brutal inanities of the one, the boasts, shifts and crapulence of the other. But there is, after all, a happy mean. As a quick, slick piece of malice, to label three American journalists 'Scab, Bum and Joe' is apt; but to deal with the entire American war effort in such terms is misleading. As for the Commun- ists, we know well enough the extent of their war-time achievement for our own good and our own ill; in no case can we just write off Russia, as Mr. Waugh would like to, as an evil, slobbering and rather ridiculous bear.
When all this is said, however, now as three years ago it still seems to me that Mr. Waugh brings Crouchback's pilgrimage to a legitimate goal: private salvation through private good faith. Despite the silliness, the convent chatter, the militant snobberies; despite the unconcealed ill-will towards nine-tenths of mankind, the mistrust of intellect and progress, the ludicrous ex cathedra pronouncements; despite the tricks, the distortions, the unabashed insolence of the entire display—despite all this Mr. Waugh asserts, through 700 pages of pithy English and matchless story-telling, that in a naughty world there is hope to be had from personal honour. If the structure which he has reared to enshrine this truth now reveals widening cracks in its fabric, it says so much the more for his skill that the whole defies gravity and stands
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