EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER

Volume 2 Number 2 - Autumn 1968

WAUGH AND BLACK HUMOR

D. J. Dooley ( University of Toronto)

In an article in the Kenyon Review in 1961, C.P. Snow referred to the transmission of a particular vein of personal and capricious comedy from Russian to English fiction as one of the clearest examples of literary ancestry which he knew. He described the agent of transmission, William Gerhardi, as the chief progenitor of modern English prose comedy, and said that he had a very sharp effect on such talented young men of the Twenties as Waugh and Anthony Powell. But as the Waugh Newsletter pointed out, Saki and Firbank could not be overlooked as comic models. Similarly, when he ridiculed the whole notion of influences in a sentence quoted by Stopp, Waugh provided us with more names to conjure with: "A lecturer in English literature might discern two sources of Dr. Wodehouse's art - the light romance of Ian Hay and the social satire of Saki, but the attribution is quite irrelevant in the world of the imagination." Still another influence on him, almost undoubtedly, is Maurice Baring, another interpreter of Russia to England and writer of comedies both English and Ruritanian. Another who ought not to be overlooked is E.M. Forster, author of some Alexandrian sketches which Waugh praised highly. In the "St. Athanasius" section of Pharos and Pharillon, for example, there is a characterization of Constantine which may have suggested Waugh's handling of him in Helena, and the scene in which that "charming and reasonable young man" Caligula runs through his new villa with a mob of carpenters and plumbers at his heels, as well as a deputation of Jews from Alexandria and a counter-deputation of anti-Semites from the same city, is close in spirit to Waugh's comedy. Forster writes:

He climbed up to look at a ceiling. They climbed too. He ran along a plan; so did the Jews. They did not speak, partly from lack of breath, partly because they were afraid of his reply. At last, turning in their faces, he asked: "Why don't you eat pork?" The counter-deputation shouted again,. The Jews replied that different races ate different things, and one of them, to carry off the situation, said some people didn't eat lamb. "Of course they don't," said the Emperor, "lamb is beastly."

To mention other possible sources of Waugh's humor is not to deny the influence of Gerhardi; when the latter was awarded an Arts Council bursary towards the end of 1966, the Observer commented that the word "genius" had been applied to him by Waugh, so that presumably Waugh read and was influenced by him.

But should Gerhardi's type of humor be called black humor? The TLS review of André Breton's Anthologie de l'humour noir discovered beneath Breton's verbiage a fairly clear idea of what black humor involves: on a personal level it is a legitimate defence against the tragedy of la condition humaine, on a social level it is an essentially scandalous protest against the intolerable concept of an "ordered" world explained by science and activated by technology. Gerhardi's tone and attitude are very different; they are established by a performance of a Chekhov play early in Futility :

You know the manner of Chekhov's writing. You know the people in his plays. It seems as though they had all been on the line of demarcation between comedy and tragedy … Fanny Ivanovna and the three sisters watched the play with intense interest, as if the Three Sisters were indeed their own particular tragedy. I sat behind Nina, and watched with that stupid scepticism that comes from too much happiness. To me, buoyant and impatient, the people in the play appeared preposterous. They distressed me intensely. Their black melancholy, their incredible inefficiency, their paralysing inertia, crept over me. How different, I thought, were those three lovable creatures who sat in our box. How careless and free they were in their own happy home. The people in the play were hopeless. At the interval, he grasps his friend Nikolai by the arm in exasperation: "How can there be such people, Nikolai Vasilievich? ...They can't get where they want. They don't even know what they want … It is a hysterical cry for greater efforts, for higher aims … Why can't people know what they want in life and get it? …" Of course as its title suggests the novel shows the gradual disillusionment of the central character, his own failure to get what he wants. But though the book is on the borderline between comedy and tragedy, it is hardly a scandalous protest against the concept of an ordered world.

It does contain a protest against sacrificing the people of one generation to secure a better social order for the next, and in connection with this protest there are some episodes of macabre humor, especially connected with the battles of Whites versus Reds in Vladivostok. But macabre humor of this type is found in English literature well before Gerhardi; one need only think of Saki's short stories or of Norman Douglas's tale of the man who fell six hundred feet from a Capri cliff and was in no condition to swim to Philadelphia. In The Living Novel V.S. Pritchett writes of the vein of fanciful horror in Thomas Hood - in poems such The Careless Nurse Mayd and Sally Simpkin's Lament. He goes on,

Gilbert, Lear, Carroll, Thackeray, the authors of Struwwelpeter and the cautionary tales continue this comic macabre tradition, which today appears to be exhausted. There is Mr. Belloc, who digressed intellectually, and there are the sardonic ballads of Mr. William Plomer.

The tradition was not exhausted; it had merely been diverted into the novel. Waugh and Huxley made use of it in the Twenties, Douglas and Beerbohm (with his Defenestration of Noaks, for example) in the previous decade.

But once again is macabre humor to be identified with black humor? In Simon Encelberg's essay on Joseph Heller (in Richard Kostelanetz's collection of essays On Contemporary Literature), the following adjectives are applied to Catch-22: sprawling, hilarious, irresponsible, compassionate, cynical, surrealistic, farcical, lacerating, readable. The terms suggest an attitude to humor and satire which is very different from the attitudes of Beerbohm, Douglas, Saki, and Waugh. It is the difference, in a way, between Waugh's The Loved One and the film of the same name, bravely advertised as "The motion picture with something to offend everyone." Discussing the movie in Life, Shana Alexander wrote that 'The true queasy-making vulgarity of The Loved One … lies in the fact that it mixes up jokes about our attitudes toward death, which are often absurd, with death itself, which never is." The essentially irresponsible attitude which Tony Richardson and Terry Southern took to their material was worlds removed from Waugh's concern with it; after all, in his Life article on Forest Lawn he suggested that the decline of Western civilization might have been observable first of all in the graveyard. Describing disorder, he implied rather than ridiculed order: like Pope and Swift, he tried to shock people into a realization of how far they had departed from a reasonable and humane standard of behaviour, whereas the black humorists seem to mock the very concept of such a standard.

SOME IRISH AND ENGLISH WAUGH BIBLIOGRAPHY II

William A. English (Limerick, Republic of Ireland) (University of Oklahoma)

Evelyn Waugh:

"An Act of Homage and Reparation to P.G. Wodehouse" London Sunday Times, July 16, 1961, pp 21, 23. The text of this article is from a July 15 B.B.C. broadcast.

"On Sloth" (The Seven Deadly Sins: 5), London Sunday Times, 1962.

"The Spirit of Edith Sitwell", Review of Sitwell's Taken Care Of, London Sunday Times, 1965.

"The Light That Did Not Wholly Fail", Reviews of Kipling's Mind and Art by A. Rutherford and Aspects of Kipling's Art by C.A. Bodelsen, London Sunday Times, Sept. ? 1964.

"Oxford Revisited", London Sunday Times, Nov. 7, 1965, p. 53.

"Embellishing The Loved One", Review of The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford, London Sunday Times, 1963.

In memoriam:

"Mr. Evelyn Waugh: Artist in Satiric Prose", an obituary, London Times, April 11, 1966.

Cyril Ray and Graham Greene, notes to obituary, London Times, April 15, 1966.

Christopher Sykes, Evelyn, an obituary, London Sunday Times, April 17, 1966.

Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh, an obituary; Observer Weekend Review, April 17, 1966.

V.S. Pritchett, Evelyn Waugh, an obituary, New Statesman, April 15, 1966, p. 547.

Waugh on Waugh, quoting the Master on some of his works, Sunday Telegraph, April 17, 1966.

Letters to the Editor on "Waugh Defence", from Kenneth Allsop, John Davenport, and Marie-Louise de Zulueta, Spectator, May 13, 1966, pp. 597-98.

Auberon Waugh, Letter to the Editor, Spectator, May 20, 1966, p. 630.

Derek Prouse talks to T. Richardson, director of the film The Loved One, London Sunday Times, Feb. 13, 1966, p. 28.

Dilys Powell, Death sans Sting, review of The Loved One film, London Sunday Times, April 3, 1966.

G.W. Lambert, Waugh on Waugh, review of Waugh's A Little Learning, The Bookman, Sept. 1964, pp. 9-11.

Rivers Carew, review of Basil Seal Rides Again, The Dubliner, III, (Spring 1964),72-73.

Julian Jebb, Evelyn Waugh: Facing the Inquisition, The London Times Saturday Review, December 23, 1967, p. 19. Contains some of the same material used in Jebb's Paris Review interview of Waugh but adds several anecdotes including one about Waugh and Belloc.

Edward Mace, Waugh on the Floor, an account of a visit to Elstree Studio during the shooting of Decline and Fall, The Observer Review, December 10, 1967, p. 25.

Philip Oakes (Atticus) - Comments on the Waugh industry, London Sunday Times, October 8, 1967, p. 13.

Commentary, a report on the British Film Institute's latest archive additions. The Scarlet Woman, 1924, donated by Terence Greenidge; screen play by Evelyn Waugh. Waugh also plays a double role in the film as Dean of Balliol and as a corrupt lord; Times Literary Supplement, February 1, 1968, p. 113.

The Ordeal of Evelyn Waugh, reviews of Donaldson's E.W.: Portrait of a Country Neighbour; Carens' The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh; the Heinemann Educational Edition of Decline and Fall; and the new uniform edition of Put Out More Flags, Times Literary Supplement, August 24,1967, p. 759.

Reviews of Alec Waugh's My Brother Evelyn and Other Portraits, (Cassell, London, 1967, 30s):

Mervyn Wall, The World of Waugh, Hibernia, Dublin, Nov. 1967, p. 25.

John Gawin, Promenade des Anglais, Irish Press, Oct. 28, 1967, p. 6.

Cyril Connolly, Fresh Strands on the Loom, London Sunday Times, October 22, 1967, p.55.

A selection from Alec Waugh's book on Evelyn, London Sunday Times Review, Nov. 19, 1967, p.65.

P.G. Wodehouse, Letter to W. Townend in Performing Flea, a self-portrait in letters {London, Herbert Jenkins, 1953), 140 pp. In the letter Wodehouse writes, ". ..I am now reading Evelyn Waugh's Put Out More Flags and am absolutely stunned by its brilliance. As a comic satiric writer he stands alone. That interview between Basil Seal and the Guards Colonel is simply marvellous. And what a masterpiece Decline and Fall was …'

SOUR GRAPES

Elaine Bender (Nassau Community College, SUNY)

In the process of evaluating any novel, there is usually some discussion of how well the novel's theme has been realized. It is somewhat difficult to do this with Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall. Waugh tries to explain his theme in two places in the novel. The first occurs when Pennyfeather refuses to take Alistair's money and thus proclaims himself to be a gentleman. This makes clear exactly what Waugh intends Pennyfeather to represent. In the second instance, when Pennyfeather goes to London after leaving Llanabba Castle and dines with Potts, Waugh tells the reader "the whole of this book is really an account of the mysterious disappearance of Paul Pennyfeather, (Dell edition, pp. 331-332)." At this point the need for a focus in the book begins to be felt intensely. The first half of the book is unified by its criticisms of traditional British education at Oxford and Llanabba Castle. Now the scene shifts to London and fashionable society, and some connection must be established. This quotation is a mechanical connection between the first and second ports of the novel. It does not, however, state the theme of the novel. For there never is an explanation of the decline and fall of the whole society; instead, it is the decadence of the declined world that has destroyed Paul.

What the novel does is to scatter satirical shots at figures up and down the social ladder from the grubby life force, Grimes, to the lovely sinner, Margot. Graham Martin, (in an essay in The Modern Age, ed. Boris Ford, Baltimore, 1961), writes that the novel leaves the impression of a "general unselective distaste." This impression arises because there is no norm or standard against which society is criticized. Such a standard is necessary for the best satire. The lack of an implicit theme makes the novel thin. It is all surface and jokes without any thematic substance. This is particularly distressing because the book demonstrates every other skill a comic novelist needs. But since there is no substance, the reader may be amused and distressed without being satisfied. Decline and Fall is merely excellent entertainment with especially skillful plotting.

As an entertainment, the book should have some subject appealing to the reader, perhaps because it is exciting or remote from his experience. Decline and Fall has such a subject: Foxhunting. The incidents of the novel can be seen as a hunt by the reader for the fox. Unfortunately, the animal is probably already dead.

The first fox of the novel is Paul Pennyfeather. He is the quarry. The hunters appear in two places. The society he lives in hunts for him. Margot and her class want to keep him as a shining pet, and so they bring him to their level, setting him up for the kill by Potts and the League of Nations. The other hunters are the readers who hunt for the Pennyfeather Waugh claims has disappeared. However, this hunt is a failure. We do not know why the society is in the state it is in, and this is the scent necessary if we are to get this fox. The satires on classes, education, the church, the penal system: these are the false scents that lead us nowhere.

Grimes is the second quarry. But he is foxier than Paul. Dogs cannot follow a scent through water. Therefore, his first suicide is by drowning, and his escape from prison leads to a dead end in a wet and marshy swamp.

While these two hunts end in failure, there is one that is a success. Little Lord Tangent is another of the quarries. The hunt for him proceeds by widely separated clues, scents that we pick up, forget, and later remember. We are not in at the kill, but the kill is a success. Here are the clues.

1. Philbrick "producing on enormous service revolver" to use as a starting pistol at the school games says "Only take care; it's loaded." (p. 278).

2. "'What's Tangent doin' in this race?' said Lady Circumference. 'The boy can't run an inch.' … Clearly Tangent was not going to win; he was sitting on the grass crying because he had been wounded in the foot by Mr. Prendergast bullet." (p. 284).

3. "'Am I going to die?' said Tangent, his mouth full of cake."

4. "'Who's that dear, dim, drunk little man?'
'That is the person who shot my son.'
'How too shattering for you. Not dead, I hope?'" (p. 295)

5. "'Tangent's foot has swollen up and turned black,' said Beste Chetwynde with relish." ( p. 306)

6. "Everybody else, however, was there, except little Lord Tangent, whose foot was being amputated at a local nursing home." (p. 316)

7. "'It's maddenin' Tangent having died just at this time,' she said." (p. 356)

This hunt has tracked down and killed its quarry. References to hunting and animals throughout the novel enforce the fox hunt theme. Most of the references are to cruelty and savagery, suggesting perhaps a disapproval of fox hunting as well as of the society. The prologue mentions that at the last Bollinger dinner "a fox had been brought in in a cage and stoned to death with champagne bottles." (p. 227). This is what almost happens to Paul: Margot cages him and stones him with luxuries. It sounds like "English county families baying for broken glass." (p.228). Ports is almost aware that he is a fox hunter. When he asks Paul to identify someone, Paul lies. The man is Grimes. Paul says he is with the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings. "'Are you sure?' asked Potts in evident disappointment. 'How maddening'. I've been on a false scent again …'

This use of a single word to imply the metaphor, elsewhere a technique that Waugh uses for all kinds of jokes, serves, in Decline and Fall, as the scent for the reader of the novel to follow if he is to see the book for what it is: a unified and entertaining study of the English fox hunt.

MISCELLANEA

J.K. McSweeney of Queens University in Ontario calls our attention to the following letter, which appeared in the Spectator (April 29, 1966) and suggests that it bears reprinting. We agree. Mr. McSweeney writes in part, "It is hard to think of two novelists more dissimilar in fundamental ways than Waugh and Angus Wilson. This tribute is as surprising as it is handsome." Angus Wilson writes:

"Since it was in the columns of the Spectator that Evelyn Waugh wrote, in contradiction of your official critic, a long, perspicacious and generous letter about one of my novels at a time when I much needed encouragement, I should be glad if you would allow me to say how much I, as a new and junior novelist, owed to his encouragement. From the moment that my first story appeared in Horizon he showed an interest, often highly critical, in what I produced; and this although our acquaintance was always of the very slightest and our political, social and religious views could hardly have been further apart.

"I feel the need to state this publicly because most of the obituaries and appreciations of him that I have read, while recognising that he was the master of us all - and how could they not? - have, I feel sure, exaggerated his isolation from contemporary writing and his intransigence in face of its concerns. He suffered no follies or mistakes, as I knew to my cost when I allowed an interview with a Sunday paper to appear with an inaccurate statement about the lineage of Robert Clive: but he was the most modest critic if he thought books were of some aesthetic value. 'Have I got it right?' he wrote to me once when he had reviewed one of my novels, and when I suggested that he had only in part seen my intention he replied with no concern other than an interest in our differing interpretations. Where novels were concerned he cared only, as I am sure others who were his juniors can confirm, that his criticism should assist and improve such original gifts as he could discover in new writers. Since adolescence I have looked forward to his new novels more than any other literary event: since middle age I have benefited by his criticism, I shall sorely miss both."

The editors wish to express their gratitude to Perry Reed of Kingsville, Texas for answering our query about the Beggarstaff correction in A Little Learning (see EWN, Winter 1967, p. 8). Waugh meant to write Beggarstaff instead of Bickerstaff (p. 197, London and American eds. ) Mr. Reed comments, "Beggarstaff was the name used by William Nicholson and James Pryde (there's a drawing of them in Beerbohm's Observations) for the posters they designed, delightful posters, much superior to Lovat Fraser, whose stuff seldom rises about cuteness."

BRIEF NEWS AND NOTES

We hope our readers are entertained by Professor Bender's spoof. We think Evelyn would find it amusing, and it represents a new departure for EWN.

Frances Donaldson's memoir of Waugh (reviewed in our Winter 1967 issue) has recently been published in the United States (Chilton Book Co., Philadelphia, $4.00).

Readers living outside the United States might be interested in knowing that the British edition of Alec Waugh's My Brother Evelyn and Other Portraits contains no photographs, while the American edition (reviewed in our last issue) has several pictures including photos of Waugh's grandchildren and a rare snapshot of Evelyn Gardner.

The famous Paris Review Waugh interview is now published in book form - Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews: Third Series (Viking Press, New York, 1967, S7.95), pp. 103-114.

The section of Brideshead Revisited dealing with Charles Ryder's return to his father's home for the Long Vac from Oxford and the ensuing social joust until Charles is called by Sebastian's telegram is published as a short story called "Charles's Holiday" in The Golden Shore (Great Short Stories Selected for Young Readers), introd. by William Peden (Platt & Munk Co., Inc., N.Y., 1967, $3.95). This book makes delightful reading; it also includes short works by Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, Hardy, Henry James, and several other prominent figures.

The original, unexpurgated edition of Decline and Fall (see EWN, Autumn 1967, pp. 4-5) is now available to American readers in a paperback anthology Seven Great British Short Novels, edited by Philip Rahv (Berkley paperback, 95 cents). The Dell Laurel paperback continues to print the bowdlerized version.

Garry Wills calls our attention to the fact that there is section of Sir Maurice Bowra's Memories, 1898-1939 (Harvard, 1967) devoted to Waugh's period at Oxford and to Waugh himself.

The recent death of Randolph Churchill recalls our pleas of several issues ago for personal reminiscences, anecdotes, letters, etc. Evelyn dedicated Put Out More Flags to Randolph; they were often in each other's company, participated in the British army mission to Tito in Yugoslavia in WW II, etc. Randolph's death means that many interesting and valuable Waugh stories are now lost forever. We hope that other valuable Waugh material will not be lost before it can be recorded.

The Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, designed to stimulate research and continue interest in the life and writings of Evelyn Waugh, is published three times a year in April, October, and December (Spring, Autumn, and Winter numbers). Subscription rate for libraries and interested individuals: $1.00 a year (10 s in England). Single copy 35 cents. Checks or money orders should be made payable to the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter. Notes, brief essays, and news items about Waugh and his work may be submitted but manuscripts cannot be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Address all correspondence to Dr. P.A. Doyle, c/o English Deportment, Nassau Community College, State University of New York, Garden City, New York 11530.