13 JANUARY 2001, Page 27

In Sword of Honour truth is stranger

than fiction; more painful too

PAUL JOHNSON

Ienjoy Evelyn Waugh's novels too much to watch television adaptations. No one, not even Jane Austen, had more skill in getting details exactly right, or took more trouble to achieve the verisimilitude which enables you to lose yourself in the truth of the fiction. So television, with its inability to capture nuance, speech inflections, verbal niceties and all the delicate hints of our complex, determinative social structure, was bound to make a hash of Sword of Honour, Waugh's harrowing valediction. Henry James, who would surely have relished Waugh, would have approved of the decision not to watch and suffer.

This long work is rightly regarded as the greatest English novel to emerge from the Hitler war, though there is not much competition. The only comparable fictions are Olivia Manning's two trilogies, set in the Balkans and Egypt, vivid evocations of time and place and, in bits, up to Waugh's habitual standard. The Americans did better, with James Jones's From Here to Eternity, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions, and other tomes. Waugh's novel, however, has the transcendent quality in which he specialised and which makes him the greatest writer of the 20th century, knocking old Proust (whom he despised) for six. He combined perfectly slavering worldliness with the fundamentally unworldly, summed up in Old Crouchback's observation to his son: sub specie aeternitatis, 'quantitative judgments do not apply' — all is quality. The work is a religious tale rather than a wartime one, Waugh using the conflict merely as a-test to sort out the good from the shits, phoneys, moral failures and monsters. The test worked on the women as well as the men, for though Waugh necessarily saw men as the chief actors in war, he in fact liked women much better, especially as friends, and recorded them with daunting precision. He even broke one of Austen's most cherished rules and reported the opposite sex talking together, something he cannot have experienced. He did it convincingly, too.

To me, the most interesting aspects of Sword of Honour are its omissions. It had to be written in three parts, because Waugh needed the money, and was thus spread over many years with consequent disjunctions. The chaos of Crete, which showed the English at their worst, was not the only searing experience Waugh underwent. Far more serious to him was the loss of Yugoslavia to the Communists, of which he was an impotent and enraged witness, and whose tragic consequences are still with us. I believe that central to his original concept of the work was the theme of betrayal. In the event, this was never worked out to its tragic climax, Waugh lacking the hardhearted strength to put his thoughts into cold, accusing print. So it survives only in fragments: Ivor Clare's dereliction of duty, punishment for which he evades thanks to the intervention of Mrs Stitch (Lady Diana Cooper), after which Clare is dismissed inexplicably from the cast. Another fragment is the ingenious De Souza and his gruesome crony, both of whom are Communist agents but, in the event, are not allowed by Waugh to fulfil their evil destinies, being dismissed from the east too. Sir Ralph Brompton, the queer diplomat, based on Harold Nicolson, also briefly appears as a Communist activist, only to be put back into the puppet box.

I think there is a missing character in the tale, through whom all these fragments would have been pulled together into the betrayal theme — the man who, effectively; by his work on the spot and his influence on Churchill, handed Yugoslavia over to Tito and his partisans. That man was, in Waugh's view, Sir Fitzroy Maclean. In the prewar years he had been a diplomat in Russia, and wrote a suggestive book, Eastern Approaches. To all externals, he was the quintessential Anglo-Scottish gentleman patriot and clansman, who died full of years and honours, esteemed by all who knew him. But there will always be a question-mark over him. If! am right, Waugh's original scheme was not only to raise that question in his novel, but also to answer it. But when it came to the point, he decided he could not face the difficulties such an accusation would produce. Or perhaps he baulked at the fictional contrivance which would be necessary.

In the event, then, the role of chief villain in the tale falls on the inadequate shoulders of Trimmer, the handsome, plebeian, ladykilling hairdresser from the Queen Maty, who becomes a fraudulent war hero. He then begets the son and heir to the honoured Crouchback name, by courtesy of Guy's 'ex', Mrs Troy, based, as always with Waugh's dire females, on his first wife, Evelyn (the Bolter') Gardner. Trimmer was not important enough to bear such a weight

of evil. Or was he? There is a connection here to the missing Maclean bit. For Maclean married into the family of Lord Lovat, the brigadier who kicked Waugh out of the Commandos, to his undying fury. Simon, Lord Lovat, the 'Shimi' of his elan, the Frasers, who raised their own private regiment in those days, was a spectacularly good-looking man, sometimes known as 'the upper-class Errol Flynn'. He became famous by leading the first Allied troops onto the beaches on D-Day, wearing the kilt and carrying only his Highlander's staff, attended by his personal piper. One day, while we were waiting for a plane at Inverness Airport, Shimi told me, 'I saved Waugh's life, you know. He behaved so badly to his men with his wicked tongue, humiliating and sneering at them, that they hated him. If they had ever gone into action together, they would have shot him on the first day, as they always do with really unpopular officers. So by kicking him out, I saved his life. But no good deed goes unpunished. He survived to write a novel portraying me as a horrible hairdresser. For Tarn Trimmer, you know.'

What Waugh liked was ironies within ironies. When he wrote Brideshead Revisited, the war was still on, and he was convinced that the upper classes, their way of life, and especially their great houses, would never survive. Hence its elegiac quality. By the time he wrote Sword of Honour, however, he knew better. The upper classes had survived, and their houses were better maintained than ever, but at the cost of their owners, and still more their chatelaines, selling souvenirs to gaping tourists who arrived by the coach-load. Waugh takes in this point in the last part of his Sword. Guy recovers part of the ancestral estate which his father foolishly sold, and is doing well there, married to a good Catholic girl of excellent family, and looking after the rising heir. That the heir is Trimmer's is one irony. But within it is the further irony that Trimmer's own ancestry, in real life, went back to the first Normans in Scotland. And there was a further irony, though Waugh did not live to see it. What poor Shimi Lovat lived to see, just before his own death, was the loss of his entire estate, plus its massive castle, Beaufort, to a businesswoman who had started life by running tourist coaches. As Waugh once remarked, truth may not be stranger than fiction, but it is much harder to bear.