My reading continues apace. I've just completed two early Evelyn Waugh novels, Decline and Fall and Handful of Dust. I last read both of these for a course in modern fiction I took as an undergraduate English major back in the mid 1960s, and my memory was pretty foggy on all but a few details, so my experience this time was almost that of a first reading. But as I read I did begin to remember why I was never a great fan of Waugh's writing. It's not that he isn't a good, or even a great, stylist. He's among the best in the language. But the substance is somehow disappointing, rather like having a meal consisting entirely of desserts.
To say that Waugh's satire is broad is probably to miss the point. His targets are everywhere he seems to look, the people, their behavior, their morals, their tastes -- he ridicules a devotion to Gothic architecture as well as to Bauhaus. His wit is so sharp and piercing that by the end of a story there's very little left to cling to. Looking back on these two rather early works, considered among his best, I find little difference in tone or spirit between Decline and Fall (1928), published before his conversion to Catholicism, and Handful of Dust (1934), published several years after. Both are peopled with self-centered and superficially annoying characters who seem to be an improbable combination of innocence and malice. Or perhaps they are simply indifferent to anything or anyone but themselves.
Waugh also does a good job of capturing the way certain of his contemporaries had perfected the employment of good manners as a weapon of social combat. Perhaps this is more apparent in Handful of Dust, where Tony Last and his cheerfully wayward spouse Brenda, display the best upper class English breeding while destroying their own lives and marriage and wreaking havoc in the lives of those who come anywhere near to them. Whereas Paul Pennyfeather, the hapless hero of Decline and Fall, although he would never think of saying anything unkind or of behaving in a selfish manner toward those whose acts of meanness and indifference bring him low, displays the supercilious good breeding of the scholarship boy. His naive acceptance of the various codes of honor he's been exposed to seems to render him somehow impervious to the troubles and indignities heaped upon him by his so-called betters.
But while the plots and characters in these books are all very amusing, and the targets of Waugh's humor are certainly worthy ones, I still find it difficult to sort out what it was that Waugh might have proposed as suitable alternatives. Some have suggested it was religion, and perhaps his Catholicism is more in evidence as an alternative in later novels, but in these early ones he seems to be entirely under the spell of the dandies and aesthetes he fell in with at university (Hertford College, Oxford). Looked at from this perspective, his targets are the usual ones of the post World War I English establishment, whose values and class prejudices he exposes as empty and frivolous. And most would probably agree, after reading a bit of Waugh's fiction, that it is very difficult to take these examples of the English upper classes seriously. It was a culture teetering before a fall, and maybe Waugh's point was that while it may be ridiculous, it really isn't very funny. Perhaps that's the difference between a Paul Pennyfeather or a Tony Last and a Bertie Wooster. (Yes, P.G. Wodehouse is also on my list, as are Max Beerbohm, Ronald Firbank, Thomas Love Peacock, and E.F. Benson.)
Anyway, that's where I am at the moment, as I continue reading Waugh, but at the same time begin my closer study of George Orwell, another superb stylist, but a writer with a very different take on English class hierarchies and cultural prejudices. (First up is Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933.) If Waugh is all desserts, Orwell definitely offers up some meat and potatoes.
0 comments:
Post a Comment