1.5 WAUGH’S LIFE REFLECTED IN HIS NOVELS

 

Retrieved from:http://www.doubtinghall.com/introduction/

 

 

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN  WAUGH’S LIFE AND HIS NOVELS

 

In February 1927 Evelyn Waugh was taking stock of his achievements to date. His professional life was at a standstill. The day before he had been sacked from the latest in a sequence of demoralising teaching jobs after making a pass at the school matron on his return from an evening at the pub. Since then he had been living with his parents at their home in North London. “I have been trying to do something about getting a job and am tired and discouraged,” he confessed dolorously to his diary. “It seems to me the time has arrived to set about being a man of letters.” His tone is airy and cynical, that of the clever young man mock-wearily bowing to the inevitable, but in retrospect it seems surprising that it took him so long.

Waugh had been born in 1903 into a family where literature would be an inescapable presence. His father Arthur worked at the publishers Chapman & Hall and his fondness for the Victorian novel instilled into Evelyn an easy familiarity with his literary heritage, an early interest in speech and language and a life-long loathing of Dickens. His brother Alec would publish his first novel The Loom of Youth at the age of eighteen, to equal levels of acclaim and censure. This fictional evocation of public school life and homosexuality prevented Evelyn from following his brother to school at Sherborne and instead he was sent to Lancing College in Sussex, a circumstance of which he would later be bitterly resentful. It was while here that Waugh began establishing the foundations of a writer’s career. As well as beginning his diary habit, he read widely for pleasure and wrote a three-act play which was performed in front of the whole school. As a letter to a schoolfriend reveals, he was able to discuss the mechanics of novel-composition with intelligence, characteristic clarity and a modernist’s interest in the potential of other media:

Try and bring home thoughts by actions and incidents. Don’t make everything said. This is the inestimable value of the Cinema to novelists (don’t scoff at this as a cheap epigram it is really very true). Make things happen… Whatever the temptation, for God’s sake don’t bring characters on simply to draw their characters and make them talk. Fit them into a design.

Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall (1928) drew for its inspiration on two sources he had come to know well: the London scene of the young upper-middle-classes and the world of provincial schoolmastering. The critical attention it received allowed him to set aside the latter and concentrate on making a name for himself in the former, a change of circumstance reflected in the frenetic Vile Bodies (1930). This was a popular success and the subsequent contracts for lucrative journalism in which he ambivalently assumed the role of spokesman for youth enabled Waugh to adopt the ‘man of letters’ role for the rest of his life. Black Mischief (1932), Scoop (1938) and his non-fiction travel books shifted their focus overseas, to the colonies of the European imperial powers and the arenas where Waugh outlined his dominant artistic themes: the ambigious conflicts between ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’, ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. In the middle of this period, drawing on the same themes but with greater seriousness and maturity, he wrote his masterpiece, A Handful of Dust (1934).

Put Out More Flags (1942) turned his unsparing comedic eye on the Phoney War of 1939-40 and resuscitated the amoral anti-hero of Black Mischief, Basil Seal, but it was the last of his novels in the same satirical manner. His later works were to be more diffuse and the Catholic faith he acquired after the breakdown of his marriage in 1930 took on a more explicit role, as in his most famous book Brideshead Revisited (1945). On the one hand this a narrative about seduction and the maturing of love, in which the central protagonist Charles Ryder is drawn into the world of Brideshead, ancestral seat of the Marchmain dynasty: his emotional relationships with the house and family eventually subside until nothing remains but the religious faith he has acquired from them. It is also a mourning for an age that had passed with the war, the waning of the English aristocracy and the ascent of ‘Hooper’, personification of the artless mass. And, though it remains his best-loved work, it is the book where Waugh’s snobbery went rampant and the sentimentality his earlier novels’ narratorial blankness and cynicism had masked was finally uncovered.

After The Loved One (1948), his Californian satire on death and America which marked a return in spirit to the earlier works, and the extraordinary semi-autobiographical The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1954), Waugh returned to his wartime experiences with the three Sword of Honour novels. Men at Arms (1952) introduced the figure of English Catholic aristocrat Guy Crouchback, awakened from his arid exile in Italy by the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939:

The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.

Its two successors Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961) traced the course of his disillusionment as his noble chivalrous ideals are revealed to have no place in modern warfare and society.

By the 1960s Waugh himself was almost entirely at variance with the outside world. He loathed Britain’s centrally planned economy and its prevailing political culture, fogeyishly arguing that he refused to vote because it was presumptuous to advise the Queen on her Parliament. But there were changes afoot that were closer to his heart and which hurt him severely. In the last years of his life the Church began a process of modernisation which left his personal theological position looked upon as eccentric and his long reputation as amusing, provocative company had suffered a blow after receiving reports that age had made him what he most feared, a ‘bore’. He died in 1966, his standing as a writer partially eclipsed by his brother Alec, whose novel Island in the Sun had received a contemporary acclaim largely denied to the later work of Evelyn’s.



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