The Books: Arguably, ‘Evelyn Waugh: The Permanent Adolescent’, by Christopher Hitchens

On the essays shelf:

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

Any big reader will have gaps in their reading, authors they never got to, authors they somehow missed, especially if said authors are not taught in school. Evelyn Waugh was one of those for me. There’s really no excuse for why I never read him, and I had certainly seen the gigantic mini-series of Brideshead Revisited with Jeremy Irons, back in the day, and had quite an obsession going on about it, but still I just never picked up the book. No excuse. There are other authors on my list. I am fully aware of the people I should have read, and I will get to them someday, is my view. But then I read a piece by Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic on Evelyn’s Waugh’s novel Scoop (excerpt here), and Hitchens’ review made me laugh out loud, so I immediately picked up the book.

Scoop, of course, is a brilliant lampooning of that animal known as “the foreign press,” with journalists pouring into a fictional country where supposedly a revolution is in place, and they race around looking for the “scoop”. Scoop is so funny that when I was reading it on the bus I made a spectacle of myself. I wrote about it here. It is, hands down, one of the funniest books I have ever read in my life. I began to read his other novels, and they are equally as funny. But humor is not the only thing that Waugh brings to the table. He is vicious, one of the most vicious writers to ever put pen to paper, and his sentences are devastating. In Hitchens’ various writing on Waugh, he will describe an episode in one of the books, and then make the observation along the lines of: “You see how many words I had to use to describe the event? Waugh does it in one sentence.” There’s Decline and Fall, his pitiless book on education (thoughts here), there’s A Handful of Dust, which is really about the rottenness of Empire and class, there’s Vile Bodies, his brilliant evocation of the mania in the youthful generation between the World Wars, their desire to just have a good time, their parties, their blatant disregard for what was starting to loom again on the Continent, and many more. And then of course, there’s Brideshead Revisited, which certainly has some humorous sequences (the cruise ship pitching through the sea is one hilarious scene), but is really an elegy for a world that was disappearing. The Downton Abbey world, if you will. Evelyn Waugh hated the modern world. He hated modernism and technology, he had nothing but contempt for all of it. Imagine a rigid conservative man seething with hatred. That’s Waugh.

However, on the flip side, he was one of the primary writers of the Jazz Age, he wrote about it, he described it, he looked at it from a lofty perspective, he understood it in a way that those lost in it couldn’t, and Vile Bodies stands up there at the tippity-top of the heap of Jazz Age writing. Obviously Fitzgerald owns that territory, but Waugh is there too.

Speaking of which, Waugh gave what is now known as “the most ill-natured interview ever” with the BBC, which has been released on CD. I don’t have the CD, but you can read some choice quotes here. The interviewer got off on the wrong foot with Waugh (perhaps there was no right foot at all with such a cranky man!), and he showed increasing annoyance at each question. Some of the quotes! Crazy! He hated the world.

Thank God he was so hilarious!

The hatred, though, came from a keen experience of loss on a culture-wide level. Brideshead is one of the most elegiac books ever written. Howards End comes close, although it’s an entirely different style. But it has the same vast-ness at the center of it, the death of the old England, the death of Empire, the death of the old ruling classes. Good riddance, many people would say. I, on occasion, would say that. I’m Irish, I don’t have sentimentality towards those horrible people. But when you read Forster, or Waugh, on the topic, what they are really talking about is the death of certain concepts, concepts like honor and loyalty and goodness and safety, all things that were completely shattered by the cataclysm of the first World War. Brideshead has a hell of a lot going on it besides that. There’s also the debauched spectacle of Sebastien, one of the most touching and tragic portrayals of what it must have been like to be gay in that time, in that era, and not to be able to express it. There is also the redeeming nature of the Catholic Church (Waugh was Catholic). The second half of the book starts to keen with a kind of exquisite agony, as you realize what is happening, what is dying, what has been lost. It’s really a masterpiece. (Some thoughts here.)

Waugh wrote a lot. There’s still much I have not read. I have a collection of Waugh’s letters which I have not read, but I will. He was BFFs with the brittle and cynical Nancy Mitford (one of the “creepy Mitford sisters,”, who was also a novelist), and the collection is filled with chatty letters to her. He was such a rigid Catholic that everyone thought he was crazy, reactionary (which he was), and he joked to Nancy in private that nobody could imagine how horrible he would be if he were not a Catholic. Hahahaha.

He was a master of the English language. He used it to devastating effect, both hilarious and tragic. His political opinions are often alarming. He was often dead-wrong – but a lot of people were in those chaotic years, the 20s and 30s. And his stuff was often quite prophetic.

Hitchens’ piece here, which was in The Atlantic in 2003, is a larger examination of the tensions in Waugh’s work as a whole: the politics, the social stuff, the humor and satire, the Catholicism, the homoeroticism, the hatred. He starts off by describing the notes Orwell had written, basically on his death bed, for a future review of Brideshead, a tantalizing prospect that never came to pass, we only have the notes. (There are quite a few connections between Orwell and Waugh, so much so that a book came out recently called The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War. I read it. It was very good.) Hitchens calls Waugh out on some of his flaws as a writer (his horrible purple-prose sex scenes, for example), but those are really quibbles when you consider the magnificent whole, as Hitchens does. (Hitchens is quite funny, though, on those sex scenes.) The final third of this very long piece is a book review of Waugh’s The Sword of Honour Trilogy, which I have not read, but I really must.

Here is an excerpt from an early section of Hitchens’ essay.

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, ‘Evelyn Waugh: The Permanent Adolescent’, by Christopher Hitchens

Waugh was not a mere propagandist, and we would not still be reading him if he had been. The ends that he reserves for the meek and the worthy and the innocent are condemnations of the worldly and the vain, as surely as in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, but they are also highly diverting for their own sake. William Boot, in Scoop, is given a thorough drubbing by reality the moment he risks leaving the shelter of Boot Magna Hall, his bucolic den. Tony Last, in A Handful of Dust, is a doomed man once he agrees to give up his country seat of Hetton and embark on a venture of overseas exploration. The element of what we glibly call noir is a fluctuating one: Both Boot and Last (cobbler’s names) are treated with extraordinary cruelty by the women they love, but the outcomes are arranged along the spectrum between pity and terror. Waugh’s mastery is most often shown by the light flick with which he could switch between the funny and the sinister. And the delicacy of this touch is shown by the breathtaking deftness with which he handled profane subjects. I have already mentioned that the gross pedophilia of Decline and Fall is so artfully suggested that an adolescent might read it unawares. And many adult reviewers of Brideshead have somehow managed to describe it as a languorous evocation of the “platonic” nature of English undergraduate affection.

But toying with his innocents, and showing how cleverly and suddenly their creator could bring them low, was for Waugh part of a serious mandate. He wanted to bring the Book of Job to life for those who had never read, or who feared, it. And he chose a time – the mid-twentieth century – when the Church he had joined was very plainly marked not just with a nostalgia for the days of Thomas More or even of Thomas Aquinas but by a reactionary modernity of its own. It is for this reason, I propose, that Waugh and Eliot still seem fresh while G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc appear quaint and antique. The plain fact is that both felt and transmitted some of the mobilizing energy of fascism.

The tweedy, fogy types who made an affectation of Waugh are generally fondest of his almost camp social conservatism: his commitment to stuffy clubs, “home” rather than “abroad,” old clothes, traditional manners, ear trumpets, rural hierarchy, ancient liturgy, and the rest of it. Their master ministered very exactly to this taste in the undoubted self-parody that adorns The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and is titled “Portrait of the Artist in Middle Age.”

His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz – everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. There was a phrase in the thirties: “It is later than you think,” which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was never later than Mr. Pinfold thought.

His face eventually grew to fit this mask, but Waugh had been very much “of” the Jazz Age, and brought it hectically to life, most notably in Vile Bodies and Brideshead. Sexual experiments, fast cars, modern steamships and airplanes – these, plus a touch of experience with modern warfare, gave him an edge that the simple, fusty reactionaries did not possess. Thus he celebrated Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia as in part a victory for progress and development, defended Franco’s invasion of Spain as a stand for tradition and property, and, in his travel book Robbery Under Law, denounced the Mexico of Cárdenas as an anti-clerical socialist kleptocracy. On some things he was conservative by instinct. (He always abominated, for example, the very idea of the United States of America.) But the dynamic element in modernism was not foreign to him, much as he later liked to pretend otherwise. And he made excellent use of this tension in his writing.