Auberon Waugh: genius and madman?
Christopher Hawtree
THE FOXGLOVE SAGA, PATH OF DALLIANCE, WHO ARE THE VIOLETS NOW?, CONSIDER THE L1LLIES, A BED OF FLOWERS by Auberon Waugh
Robin Clark, £4.95 each
The narrow partition which separates the genius from the madman has been remarked upon time and again. As the correspondence columns of this journal regularly show, there are many who have been left in little doubt that the author of these novels has not remained content with the mundane balance which most people are forced to affect. His Renaissance-like polymathy is perhaps rivalled only by that of Anthony Burgess, with whom he has been engaged in a long-running, virulent controversy over the recipe for Lancashire hot-pot and whether or not the dish is worth eating.
A generation or more has grown up since A Bed of Flowers appeared. Only the hopelessly Yobbic among them will be unaware of this diverse journalism and its frequent entanglements, the latest of which will bring rare entertainment to the High Court later in the year. (The collection of pieces, In the Lion's Den, with which he baited New Statesman readers remains one of the funniest of its sort in recent years). The prominence brought to him by this industry has obscured the novels, all now re-issued, which he published at fairly regular intervals during those 12 years when the threat of the workhouse did not loom so closely. These novels, while con- taining animadversions of such horrors as the Liberal Party and potato crisps to which he'has referred elsewhere in more recent times, form a number of elegant variations on a theme of the extremes to which anybody, however sober-minded, can be forced.
In some cases, such as that of Arthur Friendship, the unfortunate hero of Who are the Violets Now?, a wretched fate is decided for someone by the encircling, stronger-willed people; in the first novel, Martin Foxglove's malevolence is matched by other people's, and he, too, is left to endure grim poverty; Nicholas Trumpeter, the evilly-inclined vicar of Consider the Lillies, appears to be very much in charge of his own destiny, but his end is as horrible as anybody else's in this unblink- ing view of the world.
Unhappily in love and so poor that he has to churn out advice 'under various absurd guises for a woman's magazine, Arthur Friendship broods on other ways of earning a living by his pen. His meditation, in common with much of these novels, affords a brisk account of vanished Sixties fashions and displays of prescience that might have tempted the author himself if he had really wished to keep his creditors at a comfortable distance. Animals would soon rule the world. There was no place left for human beings, let alone intelligent, sensitive beings like Arthur. Geniuses would have to be drowned at birth . . . . If one was to be a leader of thought or fashion — in short, an artist — one must reflect the spirit of the times in which one lived. Novels of the past decade were quite properly expected to deal with the various problems and attitudes peculiar to the work- ing class. They were no more than the artistic expression of that great upheaval in thought known as the working-class movement. Then, for a brief period, there had been a time when the only novels taken seriously dealt with the problem of having been born a Negro in the modern world. Arthur had felt himself excluded from both these trends . . Obviously, animal novelists were the men of the future.
That way, madness all too clearly lies. The world of these novels is for the most part a familiar one, many of the characters being shadily occupied with their dealings in the 'media'. It is none the less freshly realised and the focus is consistently main- tained. Only in A Bed of Flowers does it falter. The novel opens with a fine account of a dire election-night party. 'Few En- glishmen would care to be reminded that as recently as the night of 31 March 1966, there was no colour television in the British Isles. Perhaps there are other, even more disreputable truths to be revealed about England's recent history, but these are known only to a few people.' The close, on an election night four years later, contains an incisive peroration on one of the times' most disreputable incidents. 'The defeat of Biafra vindicated British policy which was to support the Federal government with arms, money and diplomatic encourage- ment.' The intervening pages, where the machinations of the Foreign Office are set in contrast to the ideas expressed by characters gathered in a pastoral retreat, become rather too discursive for the novel, ambitious as it is, to succeed.
Perhaps the best of these novels is Consider the Lillies. 'It is my experience that other people differ from each other in only the minutest detail. They all seek freedom from discomfort, but I have never been able to see anything admirable or holy in their quest, nor any reason why I should assist them . . . So great is the shortage of priests that almost anybody is accepted nowadays.' Married to the humourless Gillian and surrounded by innumerable tiresome parishioners, Nicho- las Trumpeter manages to be both un- pleasant and uneasily sympathetic. The plot, which concerns his attempts to be rid of this dour, unresponsive wife while he is conducting an affair with the daughter of his exceedingly rich benefactor, is the most tightly organised of the five: it moves determinedly and rapidly forward with an almost hideous logic and carries lightly the fund of sour observations on which Trumpeter draws with equal readiness whether he is being assailed by oafish reporters or his brother clergymen. Only the memory of the Lancashire hot-pot can have prevented Anthony Burgess from including this remarkable book in his collection of the best 99 novels to have been published since the war.
These five elegant paperbacks together cost more than a set of Proust, the major works of Tolstoy or half-a-dozen one- volume editions of Shakespeare. If the author is not yet their rival, these novels, which have been too little known for too long, make one hope that the fear of the baillifs will soon abate and leave him free to produce some more. It would indeed by a sad irony if Cyril Connolly's repeated notion that journalism is an enemy of promise were to be proved true. Only a few strokes of the pen are needed to turn Chules Osborne into a contemporary Baron de Charlus: the rest would follow from there, and the result would surely be a work of terrifying genius.
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