Two laughing Cassandras born a century ago and much needed now
The year 1903 saw the birth of two remarkable writers and personalities: Malcolm Muggeridge, born in March, and Evelyn Waugh, born in October. They were both moralists of the most rigorous kind, preaching old-fashioned Christianity to multitudes and, in the process, adding greatly to the common stock of harmless pleasure. Both were Anglicans in childhood, anxious and guilt-ridden hedonists in manhood, then became Catholics. Both were extremists in the best sense: if they thought something was right or pleasurable or beautiful, they whipped up the horses and drove full-pelt at their opponents.
Mug said to Graham Greene, 'You are a saint trying to be a sinner. I am a sinner trying to be a saint.' As a young man Mug spent years in India and dabbled in its religious culture. Back in England he became a hard-bitten journalist (a spymaster in the war), perhaps the most gifted of the mid-century. He gave the Telegraph its razor-sharp reactionary edge, which made it such a consistently satisfying paper in those days — and for long after under his brilliant successor Colin Welch. Mug took over Punch, made it suddenly funny, savage, angrily well-written and important, then just as suddenly turned his back on it. He wrote 'middles' better than anyone else, After a quartercentury of saccharine treatment of the royal family, he sent the New Statesman an amazing piece of persiflage called 'Royal soap opera'. I remember Kingsley Martin, then editor, tossing the MS on my desk and saying, 'Malcolm has written a crackerjack; I think the best article I have ever read.' It changed the climate overnight, was indeed the prolegomenon to the Sixties, an insane, wicked time which Mug excoriated and ridiculed in due course.
Indeed it was Sixties' excess that set Mug on the road to Damascus. Hitherto he had been a hell-raiser. He was a prodigious smoker. He reminded me of Charles Lamb who, asked by Dr Parr how he managed to smoke so furiously, replied, 'I have toiled after it, Sir, as some men toil after Virtue.' He was a daring and resourceful drinker and, when tight, a most persistent seducer. One woman told me that, trapped by Mug in the back of a taxi, she had been forced to break his little finger to end his singeries. He had some notorious affairs, one with Pam Beny, wife of his proprietor. As it was stormy and both were superb letter-writers, I trust that the correspondence I know it provoked has somehow survived.
There was always repentance after excess, but in time came reform too. The smoking stopped first. Then the drink. Then meat. Then sex. God filled all these new vacuums. Mug turned anti-sex. Instead of the mistresses, there came Mother Teresa. Mug's earlier good times, his conversion, then his self-flagellation, were all, as it were, enacted in public, for throughout his maturity Mug was a TV star: his grinning monkey face and self-taught and tortured accent were in every drawing-room and pub bar for 30 years. 'First he gave us gin, then he gave us God.' He continued to agonise, however, for one drug he could not relinquish was telly-fame. He loathed it more than any of the others, but he needed it to feed his antivanity and his evangelism. So he writhed and struggled, like St Lawrence on his gridiron. His matchless wife Kitty, who ministered to him through all his transmogrifications, once put it thus: 'What is a martyr? Someone who is married to a saint.' (This remark is also attributed to Elizabeth Longford.) It will be interesting to see whether St Mug remains in the calendar of fame. Kitty observed of David Frost, 'He rose without trace.' Will Mug sink so? He never wrote sub specie aeternitatis. All was done for immediate consumption. His best book, The Thirties, was a memorable piece of instant journalism. There is a lot of Mug on tape and film, including a movie cameo as an archdeacon — he looked absolutely right in clerical gaiters. His best essays ought to be collected. There is room, too, for an epitome of his wit and wisdom. As Churchill said of F.E. Smith, 'He banked his treasure in the heart of his friends and they will guard it until their own time is come.' He is one of my secular saints, along with Dr Johnson, Jane Austen, Lamb and George Orwell.
I would not sanctify Evelyn Waugh, a much more formidable man, a writer of genius but a flawed personality. There is no doubt about his status as a writer, which continues to rise. He is beginning to be seen as the greatest novelist of the 20th century. His books are rich beyond the dreams of avarice, evety line counting, the fruit of perfect economy and verbal exactitude. His vignettes of the times are deadly accurate, carved in glittering titanium, garishly lit by black humour and a breathtaking skill in exaggeration which creates grotesque realism. I can read them again and again, always discovering new felicities, as with Jane Austen. Tiny, minor characters stick in the mind, things said resonate, metaphors cling. One tale I cannot read again is A Handful of Dust. I find it too painful, as I do Wuthering Heights and Sons and Lovers; works to be taken only once in a lifetime.
Waugh had a profound grasp of history, just as he had an unerring instinct for theology. His stories are historical companions, imagination taking us into crevices where the recorded news did not penetrate. Thus Brideshead Revisited tells us more about the interwar years than any other novel, and the trilogy he called Sword of Honour is the greatest work of fiction the second world war produced, making such efforts as From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead seem superficial. Of course Waugh wrote of the social layers he knew intimately or intuited. How else could he contrive to be so devilishly accurate? After all, Jane Austen did not try to write about frame-breakers or reproduce the chat at Brooks's. The charge of snobbery aimed at Waugh misses the point: in his early manhood he picked out certain milieux rich in incident and characters. He instantly staked his claim and mined them thereafter to great profit. Sectors of the English upper classes he returned to again and again because of the nuggets he knew were there. But the truth is he was a global miner who found veins of eccentricity and humour, both subtle and gross, in every class and race he studied, though outside his chosen world these ores were refined only into minor characters.
Waugh was not a saint and did not aspire to be one. The most he hoped for was to keep his family and his faith. He had the desolation of the true humorist. He often longed for death. He was selfish, vain, greedy and luxurious. Where Mug was warm, Waugh was chilly. Compared with Mug's invariable kindness, Waugh ejaculated spasms of cruelty. His cunning wit enabled him to make people laugh and to inflict pain. When, on one such nasty occasion, Nancy Mitford angrily asked him how he reconciled his Christianity, indeed his Catholic charity, with such callousness, he felt obliged to correct her: 'I may be everything you say. But, believe me, were it not for my religion I would scarcely be a human being.' The emphasis with which he spoke these dreadful words was horrific. Waugh believed that mankind in general, and himself in particular, had propensities for destruction, and self-destruction, that only an endless attention to the forces of order, especially the Christian faith in its purest form, could prevent from combining to detonate the final explosion, which would end life on earth and envelop all in a general hell. His life and art hinted at this catastrophe time and again. Both he and Mug painted this darkness but lit it with brief flashes of grim laughter.
Previous page
