AUTUMN BOOKS 2
Crouchback's Regress
BY KINGSLEY AMIS ;THE major theme of all Mr. Evelyn Waugh's I novels has been disintegration, social• and moral, and he has often made pod use of struc- tural devices to reflect this theme. Thus in the earlier books long stretches of narrative, heavily tpopulated with variegated characters, would give place to tiny fragmentary snapshots of the same people singly or in pairs, held for the in- stant that enabled us to infer their destiny. The result is a looser but more widely ranging kind ..of unity than that which most narratives afford, and it is here, in this apparently quite casual • attitude to matters of coherence and direction, that Mr. Waugh's celebrated airiness of manner is largely to be traced. His style, an elegant in- , strument based on scrupulous attention to syn- . tax and word-order, is perhaps secondary.
With all its virtues of economy, mobility and breadth of coverage, the dangers of the open- ranch method of character-farming, as opposed to the enclosed-pasture technique of more cautious practitioners, are obvious enough: Parts of the herd will wander off and set up on their own. Mr. Waugh can be relied on to see to it that they are brought back in time for slaughtering—being a Waugh minor character is still almost as hazardous as being a Graham Greene hero—but their cavortings meanwhile, however spectacular, may bear little relation to even the freest overall plan. Tony Last's dash up the Amazon had better have been left in its original short-story form instead of furnishing an out-of-key, and unnecessary, coda to A Handful of Dust. And there are few parallels to the headlong vigour with which the author of Work Suspended rides off in two contrary directions.
Now that its third and final volumes has ap- peared, a similar centrifugal tendency can be seen in the Men at Arms sequence. The figure of Apthorpe, brother-officer of the hero, Guy Crouchback, in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers, seemed at the time to bulk unduly large in the first volume, not only in that he suffered his pre- dictable demise at the end of that volume and Was forgotten altogether soon after the start of the next, but also by reason of his lowly status in Mr. Waugh's grotesques' gallery. When the Apthorpe portable latrine came up for the eleventh time, one had the unexpected feeling that comic material was being spread out thin. It is curious that, after giving his name to all three main sections of Men at Arms, he gets only one passing mention in the four-page authorial synopsis prefixed to Unconditional Surrender, and that as merely 'another officer.'
The second instalment, Officers and Gentle- men, promised more in the way of emergent unity among apparent diversity. It seemed to offer a firm but unstated contrast between types
* UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER. By Evelyn Waugh. (Chapman and Hall, 18s.) doing well out of the war and the social changes accompanying it (Trimmer, the ex-hairdresser turned fake-national-hero, Ludovic, the mys- terious corporal-major) and types meeting or evidently heading for various levels of disaster (Ivor Claire, the dandy who abandoned his men in Crete, Crouchback himself, condemned to military ineffectiveness and emotional dehydra- tion, Fido Hound, whom battle brought from regimental punctiliousness to appallingly comic degradation). If additional room had been found for Fido earlier, among the transients who thronged the pages devoted to training and preparation, his reappearance might have lent continuity, but one readily conceded that dis- continuity and randomness better befit an ac- count of the Cretan debacle.
Unconditional Surrender disappoints most of these hopes of final coherence. Trimmer vanishes, even though the fact that before doing so he has rendered pregnant Virginia Troy, Crouchback's ex-wife, does something to keep his memory green. Claire, whose dereliction of duty before innumerable witnesses might have pre- luded an interesting conflict of values, is let off by everybody, including Crouchback, the Army, Bellamy's Club and Mr. Waugh, who extends to him that indulgence for the ruthless egotist which he normally reserves for women of this type, from Margot Metroland to, in the present volume. Julia Stitch (described in the synopsis simply as 'a beauty'—that's enough, you see. She's a beauty all right, mate). And to take a small but significant example of the defeat of expecta- tion, _Grace-Groundling-Marchpole's counter- espionage department, whose mounting but baseless suspicions of Crouchback looked like issuing in a frenzy of injustice, fades quietly from the scene half-way through—I will suggest why in a moment.
What does tie the book to its two predecessors, and what abundantly justifies it in itself, is the continued history of Ludovic, now a major in Intelligence. While holding the post of com- mandant of a parachute training school he is terrdrised by the arrival of Crouchback, whom he supposes to know about certain events in Crete. Unaware that shock and privation have removed these from Crouchback's memory, visualising imminent exposure as the murderer of Hound and another officer, Ludovic retreats into a sort of somnambulism, from which he emerges only to play with his poodle (which he names 'Fido,' of course), plunge the Mess into leaden gloom and tinker with the volume of pensees he is compiling. Equally in this last role—that of a rather more sensitive and adult Palinurus—in his final appearance as a success- ful trashy novelist, and in his earlier career as valet-cum-secretary-cum-what-may to a diplo- mat of specialised tastes, Ludovic is a creature of the airiest fantasy.
This means that he and his doings score heavily over much else in the book, especially Crouchback and his. Even the latter's decent ac- tions have a way of arousing suspicion, as when he tries hard to save a party of Jewish refugees from miserable internment in the Balkans: Greeks or Turks, presumably, would not give him such a signal opportunity of showing how he can put duty above prejudice. But the real trouble with Crouchback is his failure to act, his great and varied inabilities. He feels this himself, and his creator claims sympathy for him as a man trying in vain to find a place for himself in a great battle of our time. This would be acceptable if he seemed to be really trying, but he never looks back from that stage, early in Men at Arms, when he appears in England in the first weeks of the war 'looking for a job' by buttonholing powerful friends at Bellamy's and writing to Cabinet Ministers' wives. What about all those jobs in the ranks of, say, Signals or the RASC? Unthinkable, naturally.
This, again, would be acceptable if Crouch- back were another kind of Waugh hero, the sort to whom cruel and unjust things are always happening. But to be a Paul Pennyfeather of 1939-45 is inconceivable for the heir of a landed recusant family, a member of Bellamy's, an officer of the Halberdiers who enjoys guest nights. And so Grace-Groundling-Marchpole's bomb fizzes away into harmlessness, Apthorpe and Ludovic draw the laughs Crouchback can- not be allowed to draw, Hound and Trimmer meet the serio-comic humiliations reserved for persons who have no dignity to start with. The lopsided construction of the sequence faithfully reflects the predicament of a hero—and the difficulty of using a hero—who is surrounded by activity he cannot share, who can barely remain on his feet, propping himself up on Catholicism and peace-time regimental tradition. No wonder he is always hurting his knee.
It is tempting to believe that Mr. Waugh, a la Pinfold, sees this more clearly than anybody else. Certainly there is a strong hint of self-conscious- ness about some of those top-people-isms with which his later work is encrusted: things like When Guy rose to leave, all his little house- hold, twenty strong, assembled to see him go, and (the time is September, 1939) Everywhere houses were being closed, furni- ture stored, children transported, servants dismissed, lawns ploughed, dower-houses and shooting-lodges crammed to capacity; mothers- in-law and nannies were everywhere gaining control.
You know, everywhere from South Shields to Llanelly. (See page 7 of the present book for the latest.) These are almost certainly put in specially to annoy the Labour Party, etc. But it would be too fanciful to say the same of the souped-up traditionalism with which, for in- stance, the funeral of Crouchback senior is re- counted. That 'baronial wrought-iron on which one was always barking one's shins at Brides- head,' and which one reviewer saw as having been largely 'torn down' in Officers and Gentle- men, is back in full profusion.
We might note here the small detail that we are invited to think it is all right for the Crouch- backs to call the local church 'the chapel' although it is not a chapel, but not all right for Box-Bender, Crouchback's brother-in-law, to call his den 'the business-room' because it is not a business-room. The Crouchback motto is It's all right when my family have always done it, or more shortly, It's all right when I do it, whether 'it' is studiously maintained uncharitableness for six years of war service or dining at a black- market restaurant. And conversely, of course, it's not all right when they do it, and this 'it' and 'they' have now multiplied exceedingly. Crouchback's original enemy, 'the Modern Age in Arms,' has come to have less to do with Germany and Russia than with jazz-lovers, diners on expenses, hirers of evening dress, Americans, pilferers' on the railways, Trimmers of all sorts, holders of temporary commissions. (Crouchback had one of those, too, but it was all right when he did it.)
These would be valid targets if clearly seen. But Trimmer cannot be made The key figure he might have become, because the task of find- ing out about him would be too distasteful; his liaison with Virginia can only be alluded to and he must be dropped from the story. Ludovic must remain insulated from probability. An American officer can be introduced, but is not worth the effort of close observation: the result is the dullest and least differentiated character Mr. Waugh has ever created. As for American enlisted men—well, Coca-Cola and peanuts and gum and whores will do for them, won't it? No, it won't, not even on TV. Guy Crouchback has maintained his integrity at the cost of keep- ing his eyes shut and his fingers in his ears.
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