BOOKS No Room for Hooper

By JOHN COLEMAN

FOR a man who, on his own confession, detests the lenses of publicity, an image of Mr. Waugh has registered %N. ith surprising clarity on the public retina. It is partly, of course, the urbanity with which he expresses illiberal, un- fashionable opinions that has made his rare state- ments in propria persona so memorable. And it is precisely the scope and intensity of his rejection of the twentieth century—and of a good deal of the nineteenth, too, I should imagine—that has made him so-pungent a present force. If Gilbert Harding can earn surcease from schoolmastering by gently grumbling, it is not hard to see how much more effective Mt. Waugh is likely to be, dealing out his -acerbities on Face to Face. This is the latest, still vibrating image; and its frag- mented, faddy, turbulent presence in certain of his books .is surely their most tiresome feature.

For Mr. Waugh reigns undisturbed as the fun- niest of living English writers. He is also one of the most technically adroit. The Ordeal of Gil- bert Pinfold, that extraordinary 'experiment in semi-autobiography, opens thus: It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will conic to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century. The originators, the exuberant men, arc extinct and in their place subsists and modestly flour- ishes a generation notable for elegance and variety of contrivance.

It would be difficult to think of a novelist to whom the pleasantly Augustan terms of that final phrase better apply than to Mr. Waugh himself: he is, one suspects, aware of this. 'Writing should be like clockwork,' is another of his dicta and his own work, with its fine timing and cunning intri- cacy of incident, supports the comparison well enough. In early books like Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies (and how bored Mr. Waugh must be by now with the constant invocation of his first two novels), a comic world of mad parties, smart talk, fast cars and corruption in modishly high places—the Twentles, in fact, of the gossip column rather than that of the. General Strike— k set revolving with dexterity and a chilly poise. There are already examples of the characteristic throw-away joke--young Tangent's amputated foot, Mr. Prendergast. murder—that is to be- come a full-grown element of later books. In Black Mischief, a young man unwittingly devours his girl-friend for dinner; and in The Loved One, an amorous mortician fixes smiles on his subjects' faces as a delicate tribute to the co-worker he adores. Somewhere along the line that runs from Harry Graham to Tom Lehrer Mr. Waugh pur- loined something for art.

There seems, however, to be fairly general agreement that the purest form of this art is to be found in the earliest books. Certainly they contain few indications of the author's presence, working as they do through swift, Firbankian cutting from one dialogue-episode' to the next.

They arc harsh, exact farce; not satire. They play on the surface of the emotions, never quite releas- ing them. Their pace and poise, the sense they 'Communicate of 'laying a game,' debar the

reader from complicity in the circumstances of stupidity, mutilation, and betrayal; in making fun out of conventionally serious occasions, they give a sort of dispensation from the everyday stress of reacting. Pity and anger are in abeyance and laughter may cone as much from the sense of relief from these as from anything else; for once the awful human exactions are not being made. The point is worth taking at this length, if only because hesitations creep in with Mr. Waugh's fourth novel, A Handful of Dust. Tony • Last may be presented as a creature of supine permissiveness in the best Pennyfeather tradition, but he is unusually well documented for a Waugh hero, principally with forms of nostalgia—for his Gothic country house and a roomful of child- hood mementoes: some sympathy seems to have been extended to his creation. The torments to which he is subjected before he makes a .break for the jungle and an original doom, though decked out with brilliancies of comedy, are so elaborated that one carries away an uneasy sense of some principle of masochism slithering just below the decorous surface.

There were occasions for doubt, then, about the art of Mr. Waugh some time before the appearance in 1945 of his most ambitious novel, Brideshead Revisited. All the world might love a laugher, -but there were those who had begun to ask themselves what exactly they were being invited to laugh at. While Mr. Waugh manipu- lated his figures of fantasy through upper-class situations, and for just so long as the conventions remained those of a game, there was no point in being incensed, because he wasn't also purveying a 'criticism of life.' Anyone who looked for a larger pattern in Vile Bodies or Scoop would be deservedly disappointed. It is, after all, important not to expect from Mr. Waugh's comedies more than they engage to give. Pinfold was 'neither a soldier npr a regular soldier; the part for which he cast himself was a combination of eccentric don and testy colonel and he acted it strenuously.' Annoyance at certain quirky interpolations may lead one. to miss much that is genuinely witty and finely conceived. But Brideshead Re- visited, now reissued with various alterations,* was a different matter: an enormously wrought- upon novel of serious intent. In the author's own words, it 'lost me such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries,' and I am bound to say that it seems to me still (the sixty or so additions and excisions are in no way fundamen- tal) a basically sapless piece of work, for all the audacities of structure, language and aim. The extent to which an author endorses the acts and beliefs of one of his characters is generally hard and hazardous to assess, but there is every

indication here that Mt Waugh wholeheartedly indulged himself, through the narrator Charles Ryder, in a kind of ornate justification of the desires on which his less attractive prejudices are based.

* BRIDESFIEAD REVISITED. By Evelyn 'Waugh. A Revised Edition with a New Preface. (Chapman and Hall, 18s.)

Ryder conies back to Brideshead, the country seat of the Catholic Marchmairis, an officer in time of war. The great house is empty and bruised: only Nanny Hawkins lives on in the nursery. Ryder remembers its glories, twenty years back, and his relations with its occupants: his Oxford days with Sebastian,. the alcoholic charmer; his passionate affair with the sister

Julia after her marriage to a rich parvenu

politician; the deaths of Lady Marchmain and of her husband, who returned from Italy with a mistress to breathe his last. We are told that Ryder, too, has become a Catholic before the end; his conversion seems to be intended as somehow redemptive of the household's tragedies,

the possible outcome of Marchmain's return to the faith on his death-bed and of Julia's heart- broken refusal of profane love. It isn't easy for a non-believer to give any value to this Divine 'twitch of the thread' that recalls the Marchmains from pagan happiness to their first allegiance, though it might be noted by \those as mystified as I that The Tablet found it 'a great 'apologetic work in the larger and more humane sense.' In the event, any apologetics that count in the book are firmly harnessed to the worlds of youthful dissipation and aristocratic high life, It is as if Mr. Waugh's ambivalent feelings for titles and landed splendours had at last resolved into an unquestioning adulation. Religion exists here (and this is not to put in question the sincerity of Mr. Waugh's private beliefs) only in so far as it adorns the Marchmains; it is another facet of

their excellence. •

The Arcadian defence of romantic imma- turity is wonderfully attempted. There is some- thing high and courageous in the pre-Raphaelite and Yellow Book imagery with which Ryder systematically inflates the passing moment. Sebastian is straight from Wilde: 'entrancing with that epicene beaut; which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.' Together, they pass through 'that low door in the wall—which opened on an enclosed ,:and enchanted garden'; in all -their sins there was something of 'nursery freshness.' All Mr. Waugh's considerable ';:powers, of humour, vivacity and pathos, are devoted to persuading the . reader of the importance of this prolongation of childhood, and there are many good 'scenes' broadcast throughout, but no power on earth could conceal the essential hollowness of the matter. And, since Ryder is so occupied in its defence, he forfeits the respect needed to carry .him through the further developments of love and suffering. The most notorious nastiness comes, of course, in Ryder's condescensions to Hooper, the mean Common Man. The good cap- tain meditates on the 'high-spirited, serious chivalrous, other-worldly' members of the upper class who were killed in the First War: These men must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin 135 right of law, to be shot off at leisure so tha things might be safe for the travelling salesman with his polygonal pince-nez. his fat wet hand shake. his grinning dentures.

But Hoopers died, too, one wants to cry out, it their tens of thousands to mate the world safe for well-nourished snobs like Ryder: one cry i! as valid as the other. Some of the lushness hat been pruned back in this new version, 'Corn munists' become 'anarchists' on page 112, an'. Brideshead's unfortunate fiancée no longer 'migh be Irish or Jewish or both.' It is suggested on th■ jacket that 'comparison of the two texts will n( doubt provide the subject of many a student' thesis.' 1 like to think that Mr. W auqh hirnsel ha-d.a sardonic hand'in this particular §tigge_stion