Books
Craftsman and classicist
Alan Watkins
A Little Order Evelyn Waugh: A Selection from his Journalism edited by Dermot Gallagher (Eyre Methuen £5.95) Evelyn Waugh attracted, as he continues to attract, anecdotes, much as others attract women, or disasters. I have long relished the story of the meeting between him and Mr Pcregine Worsthorne in Boodle's Club. Waugh was to be Mr Worsthorne's guest at dinner. They intended to discuss a forthcoming article, presumably that which appeared in the 'My Father' series in the Sunday Telegraph (and omitted from the present selection by Mr Gallagher, who teaches English at the James Cook University of North Queensland. I shall list other equally if not more strange omissions later.) Mr Worsthorne, awaiting his guest in an inner room, detected sounds of disturbance — pleas of innocence:voices raised in remonstration — coming from the entrance hall. He knew his guest had arrived but thought he could somehow insulate himself from the scene. Finally he advanced into the hall.
`Ah,' Waugh said, 'you don't seem very well-known at your club.'
Mr Worsthorne looked puzzled.
'I asked for you by name,' Waugh continued: 'Koch de Gooreynd' (as Mr Worsthorne's father, of Belgian origin, a colonel in the British Army, had indeed been called).
This was an inauspicious start. Worse was to follow. Waugh insisted on ordering the most expensive dinner on the ground, according to him, that it was being paid for by the Telegraph's proprietor. On Waugh's saying: `Do you think Mr Michael Berry could run to a decent port' (or whatever it was), Mr Worsthorne could stand it no longer.
'Look here,' he said, 'this is my club, and I am paying for dinner.'
'My dear fellow,' replied Waugh, 'I had no idea' — and scattered five pound notes over his host.
I tell this story partly as a warning: a warning not against Waugh (which is anyway superfluous) but against a certain approach to his writing. This approach has been trodden more thickly since the publication of his Diaries, and will no doubt be trodden more thickly still with the forthcoming edition of his Correspondence. The approach is to ask: 'What made. Waugh behave as he did?' (or 'be what he was?'); and it goes on to discuss, usually in an adversely critical fashion, his social and — in so far as he possessed them —political views; though, paradoxically enough, many of the aspects of modern life which he violently disliked have, in the 1970s, come to be disliked also by the political Left.
But Waugh was fundamentally uninterested in such questions. As he explained in his interview with Mr Julian Jebb in the Paris Review (also omitted by Mr Gallagher), he was concerned not with politics or psychology but with the use of words. He was also, like Samuel Johnson, slothful though highly conscientious and melancholy though very funny. Above all, he was, again like Johnson, a religious man; and we are no longer at ease in dealing with the religious. Personal courage apart, he admired two qualities or conditions: saintliness, to which he could not aspire, and craftsmanship, to which he could. It was well worth bringing some of his journalism together for instructional purposes, to show us Waugh at work. As a journalist he was not so distinguished as his son. But you can always learn something from anything Waugh wrote.
His chief virtue, I think, was to teach us not to be afraid of Latinity. Take, for example, these two sentences froth the first volume of his (uncompleted) autobiography. He is writing of his early misery at Lancing: 'I besought my father to remove me. He counselled endurance,' And now, translate that into basic English. It emerges as: 'I asked my father to take me away. He advised me to stick it out.' Fifteen words instead often. It is the same with Johnson. It is erroneous to think either that he was long-winded or (what is not quite the same thing) that he wrote in long sentences. The error is of the nineteenth century — or, perhaps, of twentieth century critics reacting against the jocose nineteenth century imitations of Johnson.
And here we come to a paradox in Waugh -which he never completely resolved. Though he wrote classical prose, his taste — more than his taste, his enthusiasm and even his love — was for the ornate, the richly-coloured, what he would have called the sumptuous. He was never a medieval romantic like Chesterton or Belloc: nevertheless he once said he would have preferred to live, not in the eighteenth, but in the seventeenth or thirteenth century. As a schoolboy he copied medieval illuminated manuscripts. In furniture his taste, as one of the pieces reprinted here makes clear, was for the 1860s. In pictures likewise it was for the nineteenth century. It was the same in literature also. He re-read Dickens and Thackeray and revered Ruskin. There is little sign of his being influenced by Macaulay, Johnson or Gibbon; still less by the earlier writers of the eighteenth century. Waugh wanted to write a rich and elaborate prose but never quite managed it, except in certain parts of Brideshead. Later he was to explain — or justify — these passages with the observation that this was gluttonous writing, a consequence of the privations of the war years. But somehow the explanation does not ring wholly true.
Yet, like many romantics, Waugh was at his best when communicating enthusiasm. In this he differed from Mr Bernard Levin, for example. Some of his encomia, of Sir Osbert Sitwell's autobiography, for instance, read rather oddly today. Others; of P. G. Wodehouse, Ronald Firbank, R. A. Knox and Max Beerbohm. retain their freshness. But, Firbank apart, Mr Gallagher has made a questionable selection. The best Waugh pieces on his favourites are: 'Mgr Ronald Knox', Horizon 1948 p. 326; 'Max Beerbohm, a lesson in manners', Atlantic 1956 p. 75; and 'An Act of Homage and Reparation to P. G. Wodehousc', Sunday Times 16 July 1961. Mr Gallagher, however, has chosen differently. Indeed, on Knox he has included a piece on the Oxford chaplaincy only, on the curious ground that those seeking Waugh's views on Knox as a literary figure can turn to Waugh's biography.
Other inexplicable omissions are: 'Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a centenary criticism', Fortnightly Review 1928, p. 595; 'An open letter to . . . Nancy Mitford . .', Encounter 1956, reprinted in Noblesse Oblige 1956; 'My Father', Sunday Telegraph 2 December 1962; 'Commando Raid on Bardia', Life 1941, p. 63; the Paris Review interview, 1963; and a review of Mr Malcolm Muggeridge's In a Valley of this Restless Mind, Spectator 27 May. 1938. (It is a pleasure to welcome, him into that very small company of writers whose work would escape the red ink of the Victorian governess,') There is nothing on the war, a hole which the Bardia piece would have filled, and — possibly more serious — nothing from Waugh on wine. Yet wine was very important to Waugh. He wrote about it frequently, in exchange for cases of the stuff: in the Wine and Food Society's magazine and in the annual The coin pleat Imbiber (both now defunct), True, most of the famous polemics are here: against Mr J. B. Priestley. against Mr Stephen Spender ('At his christening the fairy godparents showered on Mr Spender all the fashionable neuroses but they quite forgot the gift of literary skill') and, in 'Awake my soul it is a Lord', against Lord Noel-Buxton and the late Miss Nancy Spain. The book is by no means sumptuously produced, and it would be kindest to describe the editing as unobtrusive. Still, if it had not been given to me for review I should have bought it.
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