Tag Archives: Evelyn Waugh

Book review

Officers and Gentlemen, by Evelyn Waugh, 1955

Volume 2 in the Sword of Honour trilogy, and sequel to Men At Arms, Officers and Gentlemen sees our hero and Waugh avatar Guy Crouchback returning to London following the debacle at the end of the first novel. Despite the capital suffering from the worst weeks of the Blitz, aristocratic young men try their best to ignore the bombings and continue their social lives – dinner at the club, cocktails, etc – as normally as possible. Guy however is just passing through, on the search for a continuing role in which he can contribute to the war effort. He is also burdened by the responsibility of having to return the possessions of Apthorpe to a fellow officer, Trimmer McTavish.

Officers and Gentlemen (Penguin Modern Classics): Amazon.co.uk: Waugh, Evelyn: 9780141184678: Books

Guy reports back to his battalion, but nobody expects him nor knows what to do with him. Eventually he is posted to an island in the north of Scotland to join a newly formed commando unit – more to get him out of the way it seems than find him something useful to do. On the Isle of Mugg he finally tracks down McTavish and with relief hands over Apthorpe’s burdensome possessions. Waugh peoples his narrative with absurd but believable caricatures such as the explosives obsessed Laird of Mugg and his Nazi-supporting niece. Trimmer is another example – we find out that he was once a hairdresser using the name ‘Gustave’ working on the Aquitainia where one of his regular customers was Virginia (formerly Guy’s wife).

More shambolic ‘training’ and preparation for combat follows, of a sort very similar to that endured in the first novel. Waugh captures the absurdity of this stage of the war – orders issued and then immediately countermanded, an obsession with who salutes who, petty deference to authority and where administration is more important than military fitness for duty – the unit is profoundly unprepared for combat:

They had no transport, they had no cooks, they had far too many officers and sergeants, they wore a variety of uniforms and followed a multitude of conflicting regimental customs, they bore strange arms, daggers and toggle-ropes and tommy-guns.

Eventually the unit, now dubbed Operation Hookforce, after many false starts sets off Egypt, Back in the UK a morale-boosting commando raid to the occupied Channel Islands surfaces in German-occupied France. The army can’t afford another fiasco so the operation is presented as a success and its senior officer, Trimmer, is feted as a patriotic hero.

This operation presages another more serious military disaster, the evacuation of Crete, Hookforce is sent to help with the campaign, but it is utterly chaotic and the troops are quickly overwhelmed. Guy manages to get out at the very last minute, and awakes in hospital, recovering from sunstroke and a serious case of PTSD. Despite having had a decade or more to reflect on the fact, Waugh is clearly still bemused by the fact that the Allies won the war, given their extraordinary levels of incompetence. It’s no coincidence that in both this novel and Men at Arms people blow themselves up accidentally. Senior officers are obsessive and slightly deranged – Ritchie-Hook decapitates a guard in the earlier novel and in this Major Fido Hound steals his own troops rations, and Ivor Claire deserts his post and is sent to India to avoid the disgrace of a court martial.

Several scenes from Officers and Gentlemen closely follow those of Waugh’s experiences in the Second World War, with a good mixture of creative and comedic licence thrown in: “I have been in a serious battle and have decided I abominate military life,” he wrote to his wife Laura from Egypt in June 1941, after the evacuation of Crete. “It was tedious and futile & fatiguing. I found I was not at all frightened; only very bored and very weary.” This may have been bravado – many men lost their lives in Crete, and many others were taken prisoner, and Waugh was fortunate to escape unscathed. But the novel does reflect the chaotic nature of Waugh’s training and combat experience, even if Guy is a pared-back version of Waugh, more respectful of authority, trying to do the right thing while others around him are panicking or looking after number one.

At times Waugh writes like an old man looking back with bitterness across the years to a long-forgotten, ignominious war. He was only in his early fifties when he published this novel, had experienced huge success with, amongst other works Brideshead Revisited (1945) and had what would generally be described as a ‘good war’. It’s hard to understand quite what made him so embittered. We do know that he was suffering from bromide poisoning when he was writing Officers and Gentlemen, apparently taking it as a cure-all for among other things insomnia. However I don’t think one would be able to diagnose this from the text alone. On reflection I probably should have built more of a break between the first two volumes of the trilogy because close-up they felt very similar in structure and style, and I am not sure I will be able to distinguish between them in a year or two. However I will push on and finish the trilogy with Unconditional Surrender when and if the bookshops finally reopen!

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Book review

Men at Arms, by Evelyn Waugh, 1952

Men at Arms (not to be confused with the Terry Pratchett Discworld novel of the same name) is the first in Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy of novels about his experiences in

Men at Arms (Penguin Modern Classics): Amazon.co.uk: Waugh, Evelyn: 9780141185736: Books

the Second World War. His avatar for the purposes of this semi-autobiographical novel is the urbane Guy Crouchback. Guy is in his mid-thirties, has a failed marriage behind him, and his strict Catholicism means he cannot remarry. Hiding away in the family villa in Italy, Guy is moved to volunteer and join the army on the declaration of war in 1939. Being in his thirties he is considered rather old for active service and his extensive efforts to find a posting come to nothing. Nothing that is until a chance encounter leads to a role as an officer in eccentric and ancient Royal Corps of Halberdiers. In real life Waugh was in the Marines (initially at least) and it is clear that many of the experiences and challenges of army life are drawn from Waugh’s own life. Much of the novel focuses on his desultory training as an officer and the various random postings around the country, while the real events of the war take place off-stage, filtered back to the UK in a slowly descending spiral of bad news. Guy’s fellow officers are a series of fellow eccentrics and outcasts, particularly Apthorpe whose large and burdensome collection of personal possessions follows him around the country and becomes a running joke.

On leave in London during a short break in training Guy bumps into his ex-wife and her second husband Tommy Blackhouse, from whom she is also divorced. This is the kind of novel where characters are constantly bumping into friends and former lovers in unlikely circumstances, always responding in a low-key, fancy meeting you here old chap way. This motif is one of the few stylistic remnants from Waugh’s earlier comic novels where London and life was one big party for the rich and fabulous. As Guy is desperate to produce an heir to the Crouchback name, his brothers having pre-deceased him, he conceives an absurd plan to seduce and impregnate his ex-wife. Despite his efforts to get her drunk and into bed, his clumsy execution of his plan, not to mention the constant interruptions, frustrate him.

Back in training, a new officer, Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, takes command of the halberdiers, and threatens to bring some order to the chaos. While a sense of purpose is introduced the brigade seems no nearer to being combat-ready or to actually going into action, despite the steadily deteriorating position in Europe at the front. At this point in the novel there is an extended comic scene revolving round a chemical toilet, also known as a thunderbox. Quite why they need a chemical toilet when they are billeted in a school building is not explained and probably not relevant. This scene was well done and illustrated the ridiculousness of the modern army, with echoes of earlier, much more light-hearted Waugh. The feud between Apthorpe and Ritchie-Hook over ownership and exclusive access to the toilet culminates in it being sabotaged and destroyed in an explosion. Toilet humour may seem a bit out of place in this stiff-upper-lip novel of army life; the Halberdiers is an ancient brigade governed by a strict and sometimes apparently arbitrary set of rules, rituals, conventions and codes. But it is a welcome comic relief from army routine. These scenes reminded me of some chapters in Spike Milligan’s war memoirs such as Adolf Hitler, my part in his downfall, with which Men at Arms shares some dna – the extended and chaotic time spent preparing for conflict, pointless exercises, long journeys around the country ending up back in the same location, and moments of high farce.

Eventually the brigade sets sail for Dakar in Vichy French Senegal. Waugh was involved in a similar expedition to Senegal, which had a similar outcome. Having travelled all this way it comes as no surprise as the attack is called off. Nevertheless a frustrated Ritchie-Hook organises a clandestine raid on the coast, led by Guy, and returns with the severed head of an African soldier as a grisly trophy. For Ritchie-Hook this is all a gruesome game, another anecdote for when he is eventually decommissioned, but the consequences for Guy (for the unofficial raid, not for the decapitation of the guard) are serious, and he leave Senegal under a cloud. The brigade moves on to Sierra Leone where Apthorpe is hospitalised with an unspecified fever, his end hastened by a well-meaning gift of a bottle of whisky from Guy.

I’ve read quite a lot of Waugh in the past, and I am not sure how I haven’t got round to the Sword of Honour trilogy before. It is markedly different in tone from the dark comedy of his pre-war novels. Men at Arms is much closer to a straightforward memoir, with some exaggeration thrown in for comic effect. It is not a plot driven novel – the narrative meanders along at a relaxed pace. It’s also not really a war novel – the amount of combat involved in very limited and Waugh is in no way a triumphalist (the references to Churchill are pretty unflattering). Guy is something of an anti-hero, even of his own novel – he is determined to do the right thing when his country needs him and fully resigned to the discomforts and danger that military service will involve. But at the same time he tries to seduce his ex-wife, causes the death of a colleague, and the only action he sees is farcically unsuccessful. There is an honesty to this account of the early years of the war, when shambolic defeat follows defeat and only the Channel saves the country from invasion. I am pretty sure I’ll push on and read the other two novels in the trilogy to see how things pan out and try to decide whether I would recommend this to anyone other than Waugh completists or not.

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Book review

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh, 1948

This was an umpteenth re-read – I revisit The Loved One (subtitled An Anglo-American Tragedy) for a chuckle every now and again. It’s not a novel (Waugh called it a novelette) that takes itself very seriously, but it is all the better for that. It also has a lot of fun at the expense of both Americans and English ex-pats in America, so what’s not to like?Image result for loved ones waugh

Sir Ambrose Abercrombie, august representative of the British community of ex-pats in Los Angeles, descends upon Dennis Barlow, a minor poet brought to Hollywood to write the script for a film biography of Shelley, to express his concern about Barlow’s new job and how it reflects on the British community in Hollywood. Barlow has abandoned his script writing for something much more valuable to society – he works at the Happier Hunting Ground, a pet cemetery.

Barlow, tasked with the funeral arrangements of his ‘housemate’ who has killed himself having been dismissed from his job in one of the studios, “developing scripts”, (there are a lot of euphemisms and avoidances such as this in this novel) visits Hollywood’s famous funeral grounds, Whispering Glades. There he quickly falls for cosmetician (she puts make-up on corpses) Aimée Thanatogenos. He woos her with quotations from the British classics, passing them off as his own. But he has a rival, the senior mortician Mr Joyboy. Aimee is torn between her feelings for Barlow and Joyboy, but despite the helpful advice columnist of local agony aunt “Guru Brahmin” she gets engaged to Barlow. Subsequently, when she finds out his poems are plagiarised, she dumps him (in fact, she ghosts him!) and returns to Joyboy. The coffin is nailed firmly shut when she attends the funeral of Mr Joyboy’s mother’s parrot at the Happier Hunting Ground, where Barlow is in attendance. The scene is set for a macabre, blackly comic finale.

Waugh was at his comic best when he gave his satirical targets both barrels, holding nothing back. Here his contempt for Hollywood, Americans, ex-pats, you name it, is out in the open and given full rein. This is more a sketch than a fully developed novel, lacking the depth of Waugh’s other work, but it is fun despite the darkness.

 

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Book review

Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh, 1942

I re-read Scoop, Black Mischief, and Vile Bodies almost annually, yet somehow I had never got round to reading Waugh’s Put Out More Flags, which features many of the characters established in these earlier novels and could be seen as a sequel. Why that is I have no idea, but I have now rectified the omission.

Image result for Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh, 1942

Waugh’s sixth novel was written and published in 1942 and as we shall see that date is significant. The plot looks back at the first year of the war and contemplates the strange period in which at first little changed for many people followed quickly by the major upheavals thereafter.

Waugh’s characters are as usual wealthy and upper-class, and the war impacts them in (for them) unexpected ways. Country estates lose their servants. Billeting officers have to find accommodation for evacuees. Basil Seal, the louche ne-er do well of earlier novels struggles to find an army commission or any other constructive role in the war. Ambrose Silk, a gay Jewish intellectual looks elsewhere for a role, ideally in the Ministry of Information. Peter Pastmaster, about to go abroad into combat, decides to marry and father an heir in case he is killed in action.

In my eyes, the novel is less than the sum of its parts. There are admittedly some fascinating character portraits. Ambrose Silk for example is an openly gay character who Waugh treats surprisingly sympathetically. In previous novels he would have been an object of ridicule, but here he is treated as the unhappy victim of his sexual desires:

A pansy. An old queen. A habit of dress, a tone of voice, an elegant, humorous deportment that had been admired and imitated, a swift, epicene felicity of wit, the art of dazzling and confusing those he despised – these had been his; and now they were the current exchange of comedians; there were only a few restaurants, now, which he frequent without fear of ridicule, and there he was surrounded, as though by distorting mirrors, with gross reflections and caricatures of himself.

While Waugh may be tolerant of Silk’s sexuality, society is not. He writes a novel about a former lover, a Brownshirt who is now in a Nazi extermination camp. Basil spitefully engineers a situation where this work is interpreted as pro-German and Silk is forced to flee to Ireland, disguised as a priest. Waugh’s writing directly about a gay character without hiding behind euphemism or suggestion was quite transgressive for its time, showing a progression in his treatment of character.

Put Out More Flags captures a very precise moment in time, starting with the weeks before the war (“days of surmise and apprehension which cannot, without irony, be called the last days of “peace”) followed by the phoney war in which nothing seems to change very much, (“Well, we’re at war now. I expect there’ll be a lot to put up with”) and the final grim realisation that the war is starting in earnest, people are dying, and there’s no going back: “There’s only one serious occupation for a chap now, that’s killing Germans. I have an idea I shall rather enjoy it.”

Waugh’s commentary on these phases of the war is, as you would expect, scathing. His characters speculate that the decadence of the 20’s and 30’s, portrayed in his earlier novels and exemplified by his characters, are what lead Germany to believe we would not put up much resistance:

“You can’t blame Ribbentrop for thinking us decadent when he saw people like Basil about. I don’t suppose they’ll have much use for him in the Army.”

The comic elements of the novel are the outstanding chapters, for example when Basil abuses his sister’s position as local billeting officer, finding homes for evacuee children sent to the country to escape the air raids. He uses three horrible working class children to extort money from country folk who pay him to rehouse them. Incidentally there’s a disturbing hint of incest in these scenes. Doris, precocious oldest sister of the profitable evacuees, notices the incipient attraction between Basil and his sister Barbara:

“He’s your boy, isn’t he?” she said, turning to Barbara.

“He’s my brother, Doris”

“Ah” she said, her pig eyes dark with the wisdom of the slums, “but you fancy him don’t you? I saw”.

Waugh makes no attempt to disguise his class hatred – Doris has ‘pig’ eyes, not ‘pig-like’ eyes. He suggests that her ‘wisdom of the slums’ gives her an insight into the attraction between siblings that has previously always been hinted at but never openly acknowledged. Waugh never returns to this topic, but even to open this door the smallest of cracks must have been shocking to contemporary readers.

Put Out More Flags is in many ways just a series of sketches with the barest of plots. I think it is best seen as a portrait of the period, and as a transition novel between the lightly comic, absurbist novels of the pre-war period and the later, more serious Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy.

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Book review

Black Mischief, by Evelyn Waugh, 1932

In many of my previous reviews I have struggled to respond to texts that either contain offensive language – that use racially insulting terms, that denigrate gay people or women, or otherwise offend my twenty-first century sensibilities. I usually try to draw a distinction between those texts that use offensive language which was in common usage in the period in which the text was written – Huckleberry Finn, for example, with its widespread use of the n-word – and texts that are more broadly offensive, that perpetuate stereotypes or go out of their way to be insulting to racial or other groups. Sometimes I find offensive novels that have not generally been considered in that category – Perfume being the obvious example, which most reviewers found harmless but which I took great exception to. 

In almost all cases however, I have been able to find redeeming features in the text. The novelist may have been reflecting outdated attitudes towards race, gender or sexuality, but they have nevertheless managed to write something worth reading. But that is mainly because I have been careful not to read those books that should be forgotten and which don’t merit a wider readership today. History has edited these novels from our bookshelves. But this is not always the case with authors who have written otherwise well thought of work, such as Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Black Mischief’. Because ‘Black Mischief‘ is an embarrassingly offensive novel. 

The events of ‘Black Mischief‘ take place mainly in the island kingdom of Azania, one of the few independent countries in Africa between the world wars. Waugh’s intention appears overt – he sets out to demonstrate that allowing African peoples to run their own countries is a ludicrous proposition that leads to profound mis-Government, chaos, and conflict. His argument is that Africans simply don’t have the intelligence, judgment or ability to run their own affairs.

Seth, emperor of Azania, inherits his role shortly after graduating from Oxford. He determines to modernise his country, but his ambitions are portrayed as utterly unrealistic – not only does he not understand what modernisation entails, but his efforts are undermined by his people, who have no interest in the modern world, and his officials, who just want to steal anything not nailed down.

Basil Seal, a feckless college friend, journeys to Azania on a whim to escape his debts in London, and is quickly appointed Minister of Modernisation. His sidekick is the Armenian businessman Yokoumian, an equally unpleasant and racist portrait. The small group of Europeans in Azania, diplomats, businessmen and missionaries, do not escape Waugh’s satire – they are all crooks and bored idiots, particularly the British consular staff headed by Sir Samson Courtenay, but there is a venom in the portraits of the Africans in the novel that is missing when the focus turns to the Europeans. 

A pageant to celebrate birth control is used as cover for the launch of a coup against Seth, with the French consul planning to install a puppet Government headed by his senile uncle Achon, who promptly dies at his coronation. In the bloodbath that follows the League of Nations steps in and claims the country as a League of Nations Mandate. The natural order with the white man running matters is restored, and Basil returns to London, where his absence has passed largely unnoticed. 

Many reviewers claim this novel is a satire. I am not sure that is right – what precisely is it satirising? Certainly not colonialism – Azania is not a colony. Modernisation? Perhaps, but it is hard to see what aspects of modernisation are problematic. Or is it modernisation in Africa? Is Waugh telling the reader that modernising Africa is pointless, because they will just use mis-use whatever modern devices or ideas we ‘give’ them (the wires used in the railway’s construction are used as jewellery, for example). The most striking example of this is the poster drawn up to advertise the benefits of birth control, showing one family wealthy and healthy with one child, and another family with many children where life is hard and poor. These posters are misunderstood by the Africans – silly people unable to understand a simple poster – and they think the single child family is the one that is being presented as the one to avoid. 

Life is cheap in Azania – people are killed casually throughout the novel – and cannibalism is widespread. There isn’t a racist stereotype untapped. There isn’t a single positive African character, not even for contrast – they are all either evil, conniving, mercenary, or murderous. Or all four. 

Waugh is not a bad writer, but I can’t help thinking that this novel should be allowed to quietly fade away. It’s not funny, the casual and incessant racism is hard to take, and the ending is callously brutal. For the first time ever I was embarrassed to be seen reading this novel (with the front cover shown above) on public transport, which probably says it all. 

 

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