Evelyn Waugh and the Fourth Estate

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: Volume 26: Essays, Articles and Reviews, 1922–1934
edited by Donat Gallagher
Oxford, 2018, 592 pages, £100
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In September last year, Oxford University Press produced the first fruit of a monumental project, “The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh”. Forty-three scholarly volumes of everything this complex, brilliant monster sacré wrote—from seven words on a postcard in March 1910 when he was seven, to his brother, Alec; to a letter penned on the morning of his death, April 10, 1966. And of course, every­thing in between—his bright young novels, his biographies, his travel books, his mordant comedies, his magnum opus Brideshead Revisited, his masterly Sword of Honour trilogy, his journalism, and his memoir of his early years.

Overseen, as general editor, by his grandson, Alexander Waugh, the project has lured the world’s leading Wavian scholars to introduce and annotate the novels, biographies, essays, letters, reportage, travel writings, reviews, diaries, poems—even drawings and designs produced over six decades. The first four volumes cleverly encompassed the young Waugh—his personal writings, his first biography, his second novel and his autobiography. They have been joined now by Essays, Articles and Reviews, 1922–1934, containing every known piece of journalism he wrote from January 1922, when the nineteen-year-old first went up to Oxford, to December 1934, when he returned from British Guiana to great acclaim for his novel, A Handful of Dust. Of the 170 pieces, 110 have never before been reprinted.

This volume is edited by an Australian, Donat Gallagher, long-time Professor of English at James Cook University, a venerable Wavian scholar and the editor of two previous volumes of his journalism, A Little Order (1977) and a 662-page collection, Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh (1984). As OUP puts it, “They create a vivid picture of English fashions, morals and literary culture in the interwar years as well as showcasing Waugh’s early, provocative journalistic talent.” This volume contains sixty-eight essays and articles, fifty-three reviews and book pages, including film reviews, thirteen reports of Oxford Union debates and eighteen foreign correspondent’s reports from Addis Ababa.

In a sparkling introduction, Professor Gallagher opens:

Waugh was “sacked on the spot” from his last respectable teaching post on 21 February 1926, and the next day, tentatively and reluctantly, decided to “set about being a man of letters”. He tried to avoid it but, aged 24, and “swimming manfully against the tide”, he was “sucked under”. In his memoir, A Little Learning, he described his father as “a Man of Letters … A category, like the maiden aunt, that is now almost extinct.”

The earliest pieces include an accomplished article on cubism, written when he was fourteen. At twenty-one, he recommends a new war, suggesting the invasion of America “in the cause of alcohol”. A few years later, calling attention to the existence of a “younger generation”, he observes, “I do not know why that should be so, because, of course, people are born and grow up daily, and not in decades.” By the late 1920s he had mastered an impressive line in epigrams: “The arts offer the only career in which commercial failure is not necessarily discreditable.” In an examination of the trend in romans-à-clef, he writes, “‘Have you read so-and-so’s new novel?’ ‘No. Who’s in it?’”

In his editorial for Oxford’s magazine, Isis, “Wittenberg and Oxford” (February 1924), he describes Hamlet as “an undergraduate play … from any window in Oxford it would not be hard to pick out twenty Osrics and two hundred Horatios, and surely Polonius himself, napkin in hand, may be seen hobbling from dinner to the Senior Common Room”. He describes Hamlet as a typical English undergraduate, “surly at home and openly insolent to his father’s friends … woefully worried about all the obvious sorts of difficulties like suicide”. His last line is wonderfully Wavian: “Tonight the Union intend debating ‘Was Hamlet mad?’ from eight until half-past eleven—I think I can see Hamlet doing exactly the same.”

During the last seven years covered in this volume, Waugh’s output was prodigious—a life of Rossetti, three travel books, Labels, Remote People and Ninety-two Days, and his first four novels, Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust.

Halfway through writing Vile Bodies, which made his name, he discovered that “She-Evelyn”, his wife of barely a year, had fallen in love with another man. And thus, from Chapter 7, a darker, bitter tone pervades the novel. Martin Stannard, the editor of the OUP edition of the novel, notes that “the first half of the novel … was written in the anarchic spirit of Decline and Fall, and the second was the product of the more conservative perspective that characterized the remainder of his literary career”.

The irony was not lost on Waugh in his next journalistic assignment, “Let the Marriage Ceremony Mean Something”, for the Daily Mail. He writes, “Marriage, however, has always been a problem and it is one that does seem to have become more perplexing in recent years.” In discussing the difference between matrimony as a sacrament and marriage as a civil contract, he resolved it with the suggestion, “And if the candidates find they cannot accept all the implications of churchmanship then let them forgo the pageantry of bridesmaids and bouquets and the wedding march and take a taxicab to the nearest register office.”

The other event, the most significant in his life, was his reception into the Catholic Church on September 29, 1930. Three weeks later, the Daily Express published “Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened to Me”. Waugh’s last sentence reflects a view he abidingly held, “The Protestant attitude seems often to be, ‘I am good; therefore I go to church,’ while the Catholic’s is ‘I am very far from good; therefore I go to church.’”

In 1929 and 1930, in the afterglow of Vile Bodies, Waugh wrote thirteen essays on social issues for the Daily Mail. There was “Such Appalling Manners”, “Was Oxford Worth While”, keeping a diary, sun-bathing, censorship and parties. He also wrote nineteen reviews, five published almost weekly in the Graphic. His review of Henry Green’s Living (“A Neglected Masterpiece”) reveals insights on technique and, given his later views, a surprising respect for the modernists.

It is worth knowing Waugh’s opinions. Of Vita Sackville West’s The Edwardians: “Fairy godmothers at her christening showered her with all the gifts required to write a really brilliant novel about the Edwardians, except the one important gift of being able to construct a novel or draw a character that is anything more than a well-reported type.” Of Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale:

he has in literature that quality which Americans, in social life, describe as “poise”. I do not know any living writer who seems to have his work so much under control … This is, of course, both a triumph and a limitation. He is never boring or clumsy; he never gives a false impression; he is never shocking; but this very diplomatic polish makes impossible for him any of those sudden transcendent flashes of passion and beauty which less competent novelists occasionally attain.

Of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison: an “astonishing improvement in Lord Peter [Wimsey’s] character”. He had only one reservation: “Her descriptions of Bohemia do not seem at all like any sort of Bohemia I have ever encountered.”

In his review of D.H. Lawrence’s Assorted Articles, Waugh writes as much about his own position as he does about Lawrence:

It is one of the first signs of recognition, nowadays, that a writer or painter or man of fashion is getting himself talked about that he should be invited to write for the papers, usually upon some rather trivial subject. Novelists for the most part accept these invitations half-heartedly for what they are worth in guineas and publicity.

In “A Searchlight on a Classic” (January 1930), Waugh condemns Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles as “a bad book, not merely an old-fashioned one”, accusing Hardy of a “recurring theme of ill-digested snobbery”. In “Advice to the Rich” (April 1930), the Wavian wit is there: “It is really more economical in the long run, they tell us, to live in Berkeley-square. One saves so much in taxis.”

Responses to Waugh, the monster who wrote like an archangel, have been, and will always be, mixed. When Professor Gallagher’s 1984 collection appeared, Julian Barnes, in his review for the Times Literary Supplement, could not resist labelling the volume as “Maugh”, suggesting that “Maugh will mean worse”, and adding that “few will avoid the reflection that an alternative way of spending their time would be to reread half of Waugh’s fiction”. Philip Toynbee complained that Waugh’s prose had “a very elegant construction but [it was] also archaic, mandarin, even pompous”. But Professor Gallagher says that construction is exactly right; Waugh did not aspire to naturalism: “Every piece of writing … was a construction, though a construction bearing the marks of irrepressible impulse, imagination and mischief.” His next observation is striking: “Every piece was, to some extent, a performance”, added to which was his versatility, “from maliciously pointed ‘Waughspishness’ to polemic of Macaulay-like vigour and amplitude; from rapid-fire assertion to luxuriant ‘fine writing’”.

Waugh was not a pure essayist, like Belloc, but preferred books, people and places he knew at first-hand. He had a hobbyist-scholar’s love of accurate detail. Responding to a hostile review by C.H. Sissons in the London Review of Books of his 1984 collection, Gallagher puts it strikingly when he writes:

the exaggeration, bias and malice that we instinctively associate with the publicist side of Waugh were generally balanced by gravity and intelligence in his basic position. If this is true of the Abyssinia writings, it is very much more true of areas of discussion better suited to Waugh’s talents. Literature and art, and some aspects of Catholicism, brought out his best work. I compared Waugh to his greater predecessor Swift because the bitterness and self-destructive follies of both drew attention from their underlying common sense and basic good will.

Professor Gallagher dates the beginning of modern, liberal England from 1910, when Waugh was five, the year of the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition and the year of the first Welfare State measure. By 1966, the year of his death, the precepts of modernism and liberalism had become received opinion and thus Waugh’s life spanned the Modern Period. And as Gallagher has written, “the world, which had once smiled on an ultra-modern young man’s outrages, was now bitterly hostile towards his ‘ultra-conservative scourgings’”. From Bright Young Thing to Colonel Blimp. He once wrote that he disapproved of everything invented since mid-Victorian times except electric light, which allowed him to read Victorian novels in bed. But, with the end date of this volume at 1934, this is to jump ahead.

As Donat Gallagher makes clear, Waugh wrote for money, especially journalism. And yet he drew a distinction between writing “for money” and writing “for intelligent people”. “He was far too daemonic to observe it closely. He might have been prepared to suit editors’ tastes, he was much too governed by conviction, by anger, by a sense of the absurd, to tailor his work at will to their requirements.” Even his most mercenary journalism contains glimmers of real interest.

As he wrote to his long-term agent and friend, A.D. Peters, “It would be so convenient if the editors could be persuaded that I embodied the Youth Movement so that they would refer to me whenever they were collecting opinions.”

As the eminent American Wavian scholar Robert Murray Davis has put it, “Sometimes he resembles Colonel Blount, sometimes Uncle Theodore Boot, rarely or never one of his dim, sweet-tempered heroes.” Murray Davis believes that “Waugh’s reputation as an essayist deserves to be greater than it is (as a controversialist he was sometimes tedious and embarrassing), for his nonfiction is often pungent and always graceful.”

This resurgence, this tsunami of Waviana, underplayed even by its own publicists as “essentially an academic project”, is reminiscent of OUP’s launch in 2004 of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (the ODNB), the greatest feat in the history of publishing. The best studies, chambers, libraries and dens that already hold the ODNB’s sixty-one volumes of dark blue buckram should now make room, over the next few years, for the forty-three tomes, in bottle-green, navy and maroon, by one of the Dictionary’s illustrious entrants, Arthur Evelyn St John Waugh.

Such a tribute has been conferred on few—Shakespeare, of course; among more recent writers, Oscar Wilde and Edith Wharton. And now this abiding enemy of both the Common Man and the Modern Age. Even committed Wavians may quail at the fulsomeness of it all—five done and thirty-eight to go—but the polish, the production, the quality and scholarship revealed so far deserve universal praise.

The Oxford that he left at the age of twenty would be astonished to know that the young man who went down with a low third class in 1924 would, nearly a century later, be so honoured by its august presses.