Evelyn Waugh
by Ann Pasternak Slater, Northcote, £28
Evelyn Waugh’s “self-ironising public persona may have hardened into a grotesque” but, for Ann Pasternak Slater, he remains the “most consistent of our great English comic novelists”.
Pasternak Slater notes that the Waugh-bashers “tend to express their own ideological gripes against Waugh, rather than literary reservations”. This is perhaps an astute, if somewhat disreputable tactic, since most of the books are rather good. More generous readers are willing to admit as much, and even the “objects of harshest satire became his most devoted fans” As Pasternak Slater notes, “Journalists still love Scoop”.
Waugh certainly doesn’t require rescue but Pasternak Slater does a splendid job of guiding us through the major texts: from Decline and Fall (with its “insouciant iconoclasm and cheerful irreverence of a young man’s work”), via A Handful of Dust (“his greatest novel”), to later work in which conversion to Catholicism “sharpened the seriousness” of Waugh’s output. Lesser known books, like Helena, the rather puzzling semi-fictional hagiography of Constantine’s saintly mother, also come under scrutiny.
Pasternak Slater’s study has a biographical element, tracing how Waugh’s globe-trotting, wartime experiences and spiritual odyssey impacted directly on the novels, but the focus is squarely on the work and Pasternak Slater analyses Waugh’s methods and ambitions with great precision.
The goal, Waugh once wrote, was “to reduce to order the anarchic raw materials of life”. This was sometimes accompanied by a hefty dose of cultural dissatisfaction which can become wearisome, especially when Waugh hammers home a “message”. As Pasternak Slater remarks, we tend to be uncomfortable with literature that “has a palpable design on us”. Brideshead Revisited, “steeped in theology”, is a good example but Kingsley Amis was surely wrong to dismiss it as “a book about nobs for snobs”. The niggles of jealousy, perhaps, since Amis never came close to writing anything as fine as Waugh could manage when he was on top, or even middling, form.
.jpg)
