WAUGH DROPS THE PILOT

When Cyril Connolly disco- vered what Evelyn Waugh had written in the margin of his copy of The Unquiet Grave, he was deeply hurt. Alan Bell recon- structs the argument of Waugh's remarks, which are published

here for the first time

EVELYN Waugh was on active service in Yugoslavia in January 1945, basking in the knowledge that his recently issued Brides- head Revisited was beginning to do well. He received in his parcel of books from Nancy Mitford, then working for Heywood Hill, copy 99 of the limited edition of The Unquiet Grave by `Palinurus', Cyril Con- nolly's moving but disjointed compilation of his own aphorisms and of pensees borrowed from a lifetime of educated reading. The Unquiet Grave remains a very interesting book, but it is difficult to recount its impact on the sensibilities of a generation, particularly of educated offic- ers, to whom it offered a welcome com- bination of well-informed nostalgia and cultivated hope, after years of cultural rationing: an out-of-season peach, as it were, following a diet of turnip jam. Waugh was clearly irritated by such ele- ments pointing to its success, perhaps because there is more in common between the lusher passages of Brideshead and The Unquiet Grave (which each author later rightly attributed to wartime deprivations) than he would have cared to admit.

The Curwen Press limited edition on its excellent Barcham Green paper (`the press work is shocking') seemed to Waugh at first glance 'an authentic breath of Blooms- bury air', but it soon filled him with deep disquiet. 'What he writes about Christian- ity is such twaddle — real twaddle — no sense or interest, that it shakes me,' he wrote to Nancy Mitford acknowledging his parcel. 'And he seems ashamed of the pleasant part of himself — as a soft, sceptical old good liver. I am shocked by the Grave. But I have read only five or six pages. My father was a far better classical scholar than Connolly but he did not trot out his recondite quotations in at all that way. I think Connolly has lived too much with communist ladies. He must spend more time in White's.'

The nights being dark, Waugh, far from home, could devote much of his time to the newly received book. He was fascinated by the discovery of a personality he realised he had known all too little. 'There was a large blank in my acquaintance with Cyril,' he wrote to Nancy Mitford, 'which must I suppose have been a deformative period in his life. He wrote in a book that he would no longer be polite to young men with bowler hats and umbrellas. As I then thought of myself as young, sometimes wore a bowler in London and always carried an umbrella, I thought that let me out . . . Now he is White's bar chum and literary successor of E. Gosse. What a surprise then is his book!'

Further study soon detected an auto- biographical element connected with Con- nolly's first two great loves. Waugh wrote in his diary: 'Poor Lys; he sees her as the embodiment of the blackout and air raids and rationing and compulsory service and Jean as the golden past of beaches and peaches and lemurs. It is badly written in places, with painful psychological jargon which he attempts to fit into the service of theological problems.'

The various themes Waugh had identi- fied — in epicureanism, scholarship, intel- lectual fashion, social aspiration, marital discord, and above all in theology (the printed Diary refers to 'teleological prob- lems' but the manuscript confirms 'theolo- gical') led Waugh to annotate his copy thoroughly. He had it bound, plainly but serviceably, by a Belgian binder called Donnez and continued to add his red-ink adversaria in tiny writing. The annotated copy is now with Waugh's library in the Humanities Research Center at Austin and extracts are printed with the permission of the University of Texas and of the Evelyn Waugh literary estate.

At the outset, there were important questions to be asked about motives for so detailed an examination:

Why should I be interested in this book? Because I have known Cyril more than twenty years and enjoy dining with him? Because, alone in Dubrovnik, I have not much else to occupy me? Rather because Cyril is the most typical man, of my genera- tion. There but for the Grace of God literally . . . . He has the authentic lack of scho- larship of my generation — he read French while getting a third in Greats — the authentic love of leisure and liberty and good living, the authentic romantic snobbery, the authentic waste-land despair, the authentic high gift of expression. Here he is in war- time, strait-jacketed by sloth, in Blooms- bury, thinking of Jean in the South of France, peaches and Vichy water, instead of Lys and syrens and official forms. Quite clear in his heart that the ills he suffered are theological, with the vocabulary of the nonsense-philosophy he learned, holding him back. The Irish boy, the immigrant, home-sick, down at heel and ashamed, full of fun in the public house, a ready quotation on his lips, afraid of witches, afraid of the bog priest, proud of his capers; the Irishman's deeprooted belief that there are only two final realities — Hell and the USA.

Then the inscrutable figure of Palinurus, the murdered pilot whose ghost must be

The Irish immigrant . . . the drivelling woman novelist . . . the dyspeptic epicure

placated, needs to be associated with the presumed author, anonymous submitter of the manuscript to Horizon:

Who was Palinurus? First the Irish immig- rant, free from the tyranny of the bog priest, astute enough to see through that cleric's more preposterous over-simplifications, haunted by his warnings of Hell; Paddy in the new tyranny of factory system and Tammany Hall. Second the hack high-brow turning out a weekly middle on Sainte- Beuve. Third the Brains Trust pundit laden with the jargon of psychoanalysis and econo- mics. Fourth, most unaccountably, the drivelling woman novelist. Fifth, and finally, the decadent poet, the dyspeptic epicure.

None of this is specific enough for theological debate. The musings of a liter- ary dabbler in comparative religion have to be sifted by a well-informed Roman Catho- lic convert with a taste for formal casuistry. The premises of Palinurus are therefore defined as:

The Irishman's eschatology: the English gallows; Father O'Flynn's judgment; the United States of America; Hell, a dark, densely crowded place where the ancestral enemies of his tribe are tormented by the unslaked thirst of the drunkard.

Ill-informed though his Paddy may be, ignorance could have been avoided by closer attention to his catechism. 'Human life is understandable as a state of transi- tion . . . .' is marked as 'Ignorance of the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Almost all Cyril's problems are fully and simply ex- plained in the catechism.' Later in a general comment Waugh avers, 'It is a strong buttress of faith in times when one's problems appear insoluble to study the problems of one's friends and to reflect how they would all be happily resolved by acceptance of the truths of the catechism.' This is a comforting point of view from which to manage a demolition job.

`There can be no genuine self-knowledge without some knowledge of God,' reads Waugh's note on the opening paragraph about the necessity for any writer to aim at producing a masterpiece. 'But Cyril's elaborate "self-dismantling" is not the fruit of knowledge.' His `gropings after conven- tional morality' elude Waugh's definition, and Waugh says he cannot find the exact word `to describe Cyril's lapses into H. G. Wells popular culture and science. His excursions into comparative religion are all deplorable.' The compiler's presumption in taking on theological issues which he cannot begin to understand is roundly denounced. Palinurus on Pascal — 'We forget that he believes in Hell, because we can accept so much else that he believes'; Waugh replies — 'But his belief in Hell makes him coherent. Cyril's disbelief in Hell makes him what he knows himself to be.' When St John of the Cross is men- tioned in a note on Taoist quietism, Waugh adds, 'Everything St J. of the C. wrote must be read as a footnote to the creeds. Only thus are the saints intelligible. Cyril and others read the footnotes and neglect the text.' Waugh prefers throughout to see the misunderstanding aesthete in the guise of the stage Irishman: 'He has a Belfast accent. He was given a testament in the slums together with a bowl of soup. He has exacted the soup and is now exacting the testament.'

Occasionally sheer puzzlement shows itself. A reference to 'the brothel-owning Jesuits and cannon-blessings bishops of the Spanish war' produces the reflection, ' I have known many Jesuits and several brothel-keepers and never-suspected their connexion — or were these Jesuits a product of the Spanish war?' Every love- affair must reach a point where it attains marriage,' is marked 'Inexplicable. Cyril never says how he distinguishes marriage from concubinage. He is haunted by this undefined distinction; nothing in his credo allows him to define it.'

When Palinurus moves on from Christ to Chamfort, Waugh finds himself on un- familiar ground and annotates sparsely, insularity taking refuge in a general observation on the practice of polyglot quotation: All these quotations — or most of them are snobbish in their choice. I mean Palinur- us is. For they might have been said in English by almost anyone at any time. But their origin gives them a dandyism. It is more than the repetition of platitudes that have fallen from august lips — Palinurus wears their wisdom and swaggers about in it. 'You like this tie? it came from Charvet last time I was in Paris.'

`Cliché hunting is a cruel and mis- chievous hobby,' Waugh had written when reviewing Connolly's Enemies of Promise in 1938, 'the badger digging of the literary blood sports.' There he had upbraided Connolly for freely indulging in the kind of clichés he was prone to chastise in others. An Unquiet Grave passage on first loves and best marriages is endorsed, 'Enter the woman novelist — a recurrent character in this word cycle,' and in his annotations Waugh ascribes many of his victim's cliches to Palinurus's character of 'the woman novelist'. 'Emotionally exhausted', 'emo- tionally sincere', 'the complexity of mod- ern life' are all from her causerie, and, on the continuity of sun-worship 'in the break- up of religions and creeds', Waugh re- marks yet again, 'Woman novelist: these frequent lapses into clichés are evidence of the sloth he makes so much of.'

Almost as intrusive is the Brains Trust punditry of `load at the microphone'. 'I have no Angst and I don't believe you have,' Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford, 6 Enter the tosh-horse at a slow canter and exit with heaving quarters taking in the Grave margins a robust view of phrases such as 'instinctual drives' — Top. Sci. mumbo-jumbo'. A passage on enslavement to the large city with its crime-ridden slums and its boring suburbs is heavily over-written with 'Daily Mirror Picture Post Sir William Beveridge God- frey Wynne Mrs Frank Pakenham Daily Chronicle'. In part of the discussion of Chamfort's bastard-grievances 'New Statesman and Nation and Athenaeum and Week End Review' join the marginal litany of dispraise.

Early in the book, the section on Women, where it describes the destructive fury of a woman leaving her first husband, is marked 'Ethel M. Dell + Peter Q[uen- nen]. The tosh-horse.' Towards the end of the book this creature returns to the annotations. 'If we had all enjoyed happy childhoods with happy parents, then pris- ons, barracks and asylums would be emp- ty,' is marked, 'The woman novelist here makes an appearance at the brains trust.' At 'bio-psychic equilibrium', 'the tosh- horse pricks up his ears'; with germs and poisons in society under consideration, 'the tosh-horse neighs in the twilight'; 'when the present slaughter terminates . . . `Golly! hooves of the tosh-horse'; on the necessity of passion, of fanaticism, to secure the happy accomplishment of a chosen illusion, 'enter the tosh-horse at a slow canter and exit with heaving quarters' (to a criss-crossed refrain of 'Oh Joad oh woman novelist oh Clive Bell oh oh oh'). By no means all Waugh's comments are biliously disapproving. The marginal `Good' is not infrequent. Approval is shown for a good phrase (such as 'we have developed sympathy at the expense of loyalty', or that about the young and ailing Pascal and Leopardi being 'the Grand Inquisitors who break down our alibis of health and happiness'). Occasionally there are mild reservations. 'Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out,' is marked, 'Admirable. Was this written after the discovery of Sainte- Beuve?' Sometimes the Palinuran argu- ment is taken a little further. The desirabil- ity of a dignified aloofness is agreed: . . and how repellent is the grin which the illustrated papers and advertisements are trying to impose, and have imposed, on half the nation. Until a year or two ago, all "beauties" were pensive or proud. The grin is new, the result of the extinction of mirth.'

The latter half of The Unquiet Grave is much less heavily marked. There is little theology to debate, and Waugh too can luxuriate in Mediterranean reminiscence.

4 His motto should have been: Do not speak to the man at the wheel The long passages on lemurs come in for praise CAR this is entrancing. How well Palinurus understands the lower forms of creation'). Left alone with the friend he knew, Waugh finds himself in a much better mood with the book: Very much better towards the end. First Joad and the woman novelist are shaken off. Then the middles-writer of the weekly re- views, and finally the delicate plaintive poet of the decadence is left having at last found a silence where he can be heard. The last paragraphs are exquisite, after a penultimate lapse. The intrusion of all the wrong people together, Joad, the woman novelist, Clive Bell, jostling in, jostled out after an embar- rassing five minutes, through the closing door, like a party of actors in a charade who have mistaken their cue and spoiled the scene.

The limited edition of 1,000 copies of The Unquiet Grave was succeeded by a lightly revised general edition published by Hamish Hamilton in the autumn of 1945. Douglas Woodruff, editor of the Tablet, offered it to Waugh for review, as he wanted `to have something trenchantly reviewed' that season. Trenchancy could in this case be relied on. Waugh accepted eagerly, and his review 'A Pilot All at Sea' came out on 10 November 1945 (see Collected Articles, Essays and Reviews, ed. Gallagher, 281-2). Viewing the book as 'a curiosity, perhaps a portent', Waugh re- hearsed for his intelligent Catholic audi- ence some of the arguments he had worked out in the margins of his early copy.

Respecting the compiler's formal pseudonymity, he meditated on the often contradictory personalities for which Pali- nurus seemed to speak: the wistfully nos- talgic gentleman hedonist, pursued by a disorderly, blaspheming Irish valet, at the same time comical and melancholy. 'The Irishman's eschatology (Father O'Flynn 4 Waugh displayed a derisive, salacious interest in the details of Connolly's second mar- riage and the gallows . . .)' is again deployed; the modish agony-aunt novelist on her tosh-horse again appears; but the melo- diousness of the concluding prose by the gentleman writer is duly praised. Palinurus himself lamented having trusted too much in 'the calm of sky and sea'. 'I rather think the reverse,' Waugh concluded: 'too much trust in the weather reports forecasting storm. He has been duped and distracted by the chatter of psychoanalysts and social- ists. His motto should have been "Do not speak to the man at the wheel." ' Re-reading his draft, Waugh thought it was feeble, but he was pleased when reports came in of its having caused const- ernation in a limited circle. Connolly was first reported as having said, 'I will not read it. It will spoil my friendship with Evelyn,' and later (after he had been led on — reportedly by Raymond Mortimer with assurances that it was flattering), saying 'I do not mind for myself. It makes Ann Rothermere look ridiculous' — refer- ring to Waugh's remark that 'for a year the literary ladies of the Dorchester Hotel have been talking about their "angst".' Brave though he tried to show himself, Connolly was much hurt, though his later complaints that Waugh had treated him unfairly by pretending not to know who Palinurus was, so as to insult him, were invalidated by the persistent pseudonym, general though knowledge of the author's identity had become.

The two men, already cautious in their respect for each other, increased in mutual apprehensiveness, in spite of a White's club cronyship and quixotic generosities like the gift of The Loved One to make a whole issue of Horizon in 1948. Waugh tried to ensure that after Edmund Wilson (who had become a special bugbear) had praised The Unquiet Grave to Americans, his own views of Connolly's book should receive transatlantic publicity, as 'some yanks have taken him seriously'.

Connolly later found himself commis- sioned by Time in 1950 to w rite a profile of Waugh, which in the event was never published. While it was being prepared, Waugh wrote to Graham Greene that he `may have to horsewhip him on the steps of his club'. White's was spared such a scene, however, and the surviving drafts of this interesting assessment show Connolly paying back some of Waugh's jibes about his Irish background by a long disquisition on Waugh's own Scottish Border presbyte- rian ancestry. Over several years Waugh displayed a derisive, salacious interest in the details of Connolly's second marriage to, and divorce from, Barbara Skelton, but he remained wary of Connolly as a critic. Remarks about the 'benign lethargy' appa- rent in the course of the Sword of Honour trilogy caused undue anxiety to its aggrieved author; the character of Everard Spruce, the wartime cultural entrepreneur of Unconditional Surrender (1961), may be the more clearly depicted as a result.

Years later, on a visit to Texas, Connolly chanced upon the marked copy of The Unquiet Grave. He was deeply upset, and soon after sold many of his inscribed Waugh first editions at Christie's in 1974. Among them was the 'private' preliminary edition of Brideshead bearing the message, `Pray do not let your London friends persuade you that you are caricatured in this old-fashioned fiction. Think of all that Belloc wrote of the noble qualities of the men of Sussex and be guided by them.'

When Nancy Mitford heard of the mar- ginal notes on The Unquiet Grave, she exlaimed: 'Wasn't Evelyn a monster — oh how I miss him!'

Alan Bell is the Librarian of Rhodes House, Oxford.