Hooperisms
Peter Levi
The Writings of Evelyn Waugh Ian Littlewood (Blackwell £12.50)
Evelyn Waugh's prose style is humorous, lucid, biting and very modern. It is not at all easy to imitate, even for a few sentences. Yet he was faultless for Pages and chapters on end, sometimes for a Whole book at a time. His prose is thrilling; it is just as he wanted it to be. He was all but born with this amazing gift. A piece he wrote in the form of a letter to Isis magazine, when he was still an undergraduate, already shows his prose style in perfect order. What ruffled that Pure, surface was his ambition, in the end successful, to become a great writer. The faults in some of the lusher passages of Brideshead, for example, are not quite due to nostalgia, still less to snobbery; they are due to the ambition to include more love and more of the world, to be wise, to write deeply and truthfully, and to observe things 111 many ways at once. They are faults of honesty, not of artifice. Wisdom is unsettl- 14. A writer who, in the course of a full lifework, confronts and uses every part of his experience and personal development will hardly do so in an even tone of voice.
And why was Waugh's style so perfect so early? Through ambitious study and hard work. And it was a witty style, it had a dan- dy lightness, which was a young man's in- vention. Another factor is that it owed a good deal to a private language, a style of Joke between intimate friends. To read the works of some of Waugh's contemporaries, one would think they had lived alone in Surrey, chewing drawing-room curtains. But the deadliness and the sparkling clarity of Evelyn Waugh in his writings as a young man owe something, though not everything, to conversation with his private
friends. Sharpness and elegance of that kind are not the fruits of solitude. Of course he had other qualities, both as a man and as a writer. The sadness and even the melancholy rage that can underlie brilliance and may be its source are prover- bial. There are few writers, if any, about whom so much intimate detail is common knowledge.
And yet the critics constantly get him wrong. The dull and awkward scholar berating the subtle and cat-like writer is a recurring figure of modern literature; one has nothing against awkwardness and little against dullness in scholars. It is even ad- missible that readers exist, not real book readers or fanciers but students or self- improvers, who need to have their minds made for them by Evelyn Waugh. Those of us whose views of his writings are based on 30 years and more of constant delight are probably unintended readers of such criticism. But we are more numerous and should have our say, particularly where a past that we remember is concerned. Ian Littlewood is Hooper in an academic gown, and his criticism has a chilling tone. A writer who explains the ethos of a dead period by quoting Martin Green's paraphrase of Goronwy Rees does not in- spire the confidence of the elderly. One might as well quote Nigel Dempster's paraphrase of Guy Burgess in a book about T.S. Eliot.
Mr Littlewood's experience is apparently limited. He may be young. He goes on as if Waugh had invented the decline in quality of life out of pure snobbery, and as if Waugh's horror over the fate of the greater and the lesser grand houses were not, over the period of his life, objectively justified and crying out to heaven. He even implies that the inferiority of Hertford College, Ox- ford was not a fact of nature, an objective phenomenon of social history which everyone noticed, until the most recent years. In fact Waugh's style is so seductive that Littlewood comes close to suggesting he invented his subject matter. Is that not Hooper all over? `Behind Hooper lies the Golden Age, before him lies the millenium'. `Hooper's Christian destiny is to struggle from Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained.'
Of course, a lot you would expect Hooper to say would be true. So it is here, but it is also unsufferably obvious. When Mr F. Stopp was writing the first critical book ever published about Evelyn Waugh, Ronald Knox is supposed to have sent him a telegram, `STOPP, STOP STOP'. This flippant insult comes to mind because academic criticism has contributed so little.
It probes here into what it calls Waugh's escapism and his defences. But we know all that we need about that and more than we know of any other important modern writer in English, except perhaps Hemingway, from Waugh's own writings, his diaries, his letters and the volume of memoirs edited by David Pryce-Jones. This book probes to no purpose, and it offers impertinent reflec- tions. `These hints of seriousness point to ttie possibility of areas that cannot properly be conveyed by Waugh's chosen tone'. But Waugh has conveyed them, has he not? `The line does not ring true . . . "He strikes a note which celebrates landscapes which are imaginary rather than real'. If one analyses that sentence it begins to flicker on the page.
Waugh's style has an appearance of being downright, but it also has a surface shimmer too subtle for this sort of socially- based analysis. Even as a man, let alone as a writer, he was far more intelligent and in- tellectually more formidable than his critics are nowadays. His art gets explained in terms of his life. Mr Littlewood takes a more comprehending line than most, but he will not leave off accusing the books of `a concept of escape', however inappropriate- ly. This is typical of the hubris of academic critics the world over. `In most of his early fiction there is the skeleton of a serious novel which can be uncovered by the exer- cise of a little ingenuity.' Unnecessary in- genuity. Waugh would have thought Mr Littlewood a booby, and how could one have blamed him?
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