In Eternity—there can be no doubt!—the de Selby codex will never be deciphered. Hatchjaw, Bassett, Kraus, and du Garbandier will continue to contribute the same incompatible commentaries about its content. They will “eternally” continue to malign each other, and they will hate each other with an animal intensity until ending time and time and time again in the same identical madness.
“Hell,” O’Brien wrote, “goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.”
AND OF COURSE WAUGH. Borges is always unexpected. In his Textos cautivos [Captive Texts], the collection of literary notes and reviews published in El Hogar, a one-time magazine published in Buenos Aires for families and ladies in particular, I discover a “synthetic biography” of Evelyn Waugh, whose first paragraph reads:
One of the distinguishing features of the picaresque novel—the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, El buscón, o gran tacaño, by Quevedo, the remarkable Simplicissimus, by Grimmelshausen, Gil Blas—is that its hero tends not to be a pícaro, but rather a guileless and impassioned youth whom chance tosses among pícaros and who ends up becoming accustomed (innocently) to the practices of infamy. The novels of Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930), belong precisely to that canon.
None of the English novelist’s biographers: neither the one thousand and something pages about his life written by Martin Stannard, nor the book by Christopher Sykes, his classmate at Oxford, would have been able to establish with such clarity the feature Borges mentioned with such naturalness: the preservation of the innocence of an infamous circle, and, above all, pointing out the author’s genealogy in a universal order.
Nor would have Waugh himself. Not in his novelistic oeuvre, in his essays, or in his diaries exists even a hint of literary interest about what might happen outside the Anglo-Saxon world. Neither Gogol, nor Dostoyevsky, nor Cervantes, nor Tolstoy, nor Kafka, nor Mann, nor Freud, nor Goethe, nor Jung, nor much less the inter-war avant-garde experiments: expressionism, futurism, Dadaism, surrealism make up part of the author’s literary register. The vision of Europe as a cultural entity existed for him only from a religious angle, specifically Catholicism. Entrenched in the vast English literature, he never came to know that the genre he practiced so masterfully, and its very themes, belonged to an ancient and celebrated universal tradition. Borges, in his text for El Hogar, added: “Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies are two unreal and extremely entertaining books. If they are similar (remotely) to anyone it is the irresponsible and magnificent Stevenson of New Arabian Nights and The Misadventures of John Nicholson.” Anthony Powell, a contemporary and friend of Waugh, found in Decline and Fall a vitality that came from Dickens, only stylized and expurgated of all sentimentalism.
Evelyn’s father, Arthur Waugh, the literary director of a prestigious publishing house, drew his son to literature as soon as he learned to read and imposed on him the task of writing a diary. At the preparatory and boarding schools he would attend he professed to feel a vocation for the priesthood, which he did not abandon until he arrived at Oxford. His classmates from preparatory school remember him as a tense and aggressive adolescent. Cecil Beaton, the soon-to-be renowned photographer and designer, a bit younger than he, recalled his harshness and the mistreatment to which he subjected the weaker students. From adolescence he began to abhor the slovenliness and boorish manners of the working classes; parallel to that aversion he developed, as an antidote, a cast-iron snobbishness.
Anthony Powell recounts that, after Oxford, they began to meet in London. Waugh was going through the worst moment of his life, but he did not allow himself to show it; he was a cabinet-maker’s apprentice in a school of arts and crafts. The first time they met by chance on the street Waugh barely let him speak. He presented himself as an adventurer who, though lacking any particular skill and although his works might still be mediocre, was certain that sooner or later the opportunity would present itself to prove to everyone how far he could go.
It seemed that “all Waugh’s energies were concentrated on the rôle he was playing, even however grotesque or absurd.” And, indeed, in the photographs from later years, next to his friends, the Sitwell brothers, Henry Green, Harold Acton, Bryan Guinness, the same Anthony Powell, heirs to great titles or to industrial fortunes, they seem perfectly and naturally elegant; but in Waugh’s clothes, on the other hand, there is something dissonant. Of course his suits had been cut by the same excellent tailors, his shirts custom-made, but something in him was not natural. During that time, after Oxford, Powell dined at Waugh’s home, and the latter enjoyed demonstrating to his friend his father’s intellectual character, but his father’s modesty tormented him. Arthur Waugh made a show of belonging to an intermediate stratum of the middle class. By contrast, Powell, who came from the upper industrial bourgeoisie, felt perfectly at ease in the presence of the erudite man who seemed to know from memory the best of English literature, and was surprised by Evelyn’s bitter expression in response to his father’s reference to his social class, as if it terrified him that the much-awaited opportunity would never arrive and he should remain until the end a poor teacher in second-class schools, or worse, descend to an even more inferior stratum. Then, with effort, he regained his composure and showed strength, certainty, like a tactician who had already calculated the necessary steps to reach the heights.
Three events were seminal in his life: his stay at Oxford, a first disastrous marriage, and his conversion to Catholicism.
At Oxford he discovered Eden. His bouts of melancholy disappeared, the tension, the effort to conceal his weaknesses, all the neurotic traits that had incubated in previous schools. In his early letters to former prep school classmates jovial sentences appear: “Life here is very beautiful,”43 “I am still content to lead my solitary and quiet life here. I have enough friends to keep me from being lonely and not enough to bother me.”44 He studied little, but he discovered a little-known and indescribable world of astonishing personalities and cultural fields of which he did not have the slightest idea. His popularity was immense. Some of his classmates remembered him from when he was already famous for his endless revelries, his impressive ability to elaborate, in the midst of an impressive drunkenness, fascinating stories, where delirium mixed with a reality full of holes. “When he was not melancholy he had the gift of being immensely entertaining, especially when he was drinking.” This comment is repeated almost verbatim in the memory of those who dealt with him then. He published literary magazines and conversed intensely about literature with brilliant youths, and he knew the disparate life choices of his new friends. Harold Acton was the leader of the orchestra, the maestro assoluto, the demiurge who, from a malleable and receptive group, formed none too insignificant individuals. At Oxford, Acton was the anti-athlete par excellence; a full-time aesthete, his knowledge of various subjects was dazzling. He was the son of a rich art dealer and an American millionairess. The Actons lived almost exclusively in La Pietra, a celebrated palace near Florence. Through his father, this young aesthete had met Diaghilev, Ravel, Rebecca West, and that eccentric novelist, Ronald Firbank, whom the entire group over which Acton presided worshipped, and whose narrative methods Waugh appropriated with great skill in his early novels. The circle was made up for the most part of old friends from Eton, the boarding school that educated the English aristocracy, a hive of dandies who possessed a disconcerting language similar to that used in the comedies of the Restoration (which Evelyn learned quickly and enriched with his superior talent, to the point of speaking naturally like a witty character from Congreve or Sheridan). Some members of the circle were merely decorative, others catastrophically hysterical, but those closest to the Maestro possessed an authentic cultural avidity. Acton conversed on the Baroque and the Rococo, on Florence and its treatures, on the Sitwells, who also owned a palace on the outskirts of the city. By way of Edith Sitwell he extended his relationships to Gertrude Stein, Eliot, and Joyce. Waugh’s world
was transformed. Picasso and the Gestalt psychologists, Le Corbusier and modern architecture, Roger Fry’s new concepts on plastic arts, the poetry of Eliot and of Edith Sitwell. All this allowed him to keep the necessary distance from his former teacher: his father, the publisher. During that period, Acton organized a poetry recital with Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell; it was the first appearance of the avant-garde in that temple of tradition that was Oxford. The event enjoyed an exceptionally enthusiastic reception that no one, above all the participants, could have imagined. Waugh, who until then knew only traditional English literature, was the most fervent disciple of that extraordinary teacher, to whom he dedicated his first novel. Acton remembers him in his memoirs as a young faun, from whose vitality, malice, and self-assurance one could expect great achievements.
The subject of homosexuality was treated with general openness at Oxford, especially among the graduates of Eton, where many of them had practiced it. To have homoerotic relationships, whether platonic or physical, provided the young Waugh a long-dreamt-of détente. Oxford appears in all of his novels (except Helena, of course, which is set in Imperial Rome) and although in some the word is never mentioned, its presence is felt. His characters, both the good and the perverse, possess the traits of an acquaintance, as a rule a student from Oxford, or a composite of many. His women represent the sum of the defects and silliness of the mothers and sisters of his closest friends. The ensuing years, during the frequent encounters with Anthony Powell in London, were unpleasant and oppressive. He carried with him an inadequacy. He had left behind the splendor of a language that was created and recreated in complicated arabesques, the parties, liqueurs always within reach, the wit and charm of an epicene world, sumptuous, provocative and civilized. It was an unrepeatable past it seems. All that remained was grisaille. In order to confront it, a structure of steel was required, an ironlike discipline, a form, a distance, a shield, a cuirass. He endured a few years. Suddenly, one night he attempts suicide on the Welsh coast. He walks toward the sea with the steps of a sleepwalker. Nothingness has penetrated his spirit. He strips off his clothes, writes a farewell letter to his parents and hurls himself into the sea. He finished just a few strokes before feeling an electric charge in his shoulder, and an instant later his entire body is a battlefield. He’s fallen into a swarm of jellyfish. He barely makes it to the beach, rips up the letter, dresses, and returns, overwhelmed that an act that should have been solemn has devolved into an act of buffoonery, on the fringe of a grey reality into which he has waded in recent years.
What is certain is that when he left Oxford at twenty-one without a degree, nor the scantest of academic credentials, his destiny becomes uncertain. After bidding farewell to his friends, he records in his diary (16 September 1924): “My life of poverty, chastity and obedience commences….”45 He did not know how true this was to be, nor for how long he would have to endure it. He was aware that his friends had begun their careers, were being quoted in the press, publishing books while he was unable to find the opportunity that he expected to present itself, the one he discussed with Powell. He enrolls in an academy of painting and a few months later decides that it doesn’t suit him; he moves on to an engraving workshop with the same result; he studies carpentry in a school of arts and crafts, only to obtain, later, a lowly position as a teacher in a seedy school in Wales, which culminates in his suicide attempt. He takes advantage of his vacation to visit close friends, where in the meanwhile he writes his first novel: Decline and Fall, which immediately on its publication in 1928 transforms him into one of England’s truly important writers. The “only first-rate comic genius the English have produced since George Bernard Shaw,” declared Edmund Wilson, in the United States, after reading Waugh’s early novels.
The publication of Decline and Fall signals the beginning of an astonishing career. The critics welcomed him enthusiastically. In short order he is transformed into a novelist unanimously celebrated by his peers and at the same time applauded by the public. To innovate within a genre without wishing to be an avant-gardist is tremendously difficult. Waugh achieved it.
His novels have as their protagonist England’s high society of the twenties and thirties of the past century. Waugh exposes the cesspools of these refined circles, discovers the skeletons hidden in their closets, glimpses the ties that connect the upper echelons of power with crime and corruption, but without ever approaching melodrama, much less an ideological discourse. He toys with inordinacy. Parody turns into caricature and puppet theater. He is able to manage ferocity, cruelty, and madness with a delight that, instead of devolving into dark literature, or the merely grotesque, approaches an elegant comedy of manners. The author never comments morally on his characters’ actions; instead, he is content to be an eye that watches through a deformed lens that expands and diminishes all that he sees. To achieve this it was necessary to create a different language, alien from that of the realist novel, a nervous language, incisive, witty and wicked, the most apt for describing a frightening scene with the greatest economy of means, at times through mere allusion, or echoes of allusion, but also with a perfidious tautness to describe a disproportionate ocurrence. The comicality is permanent. Every scene generates other scenes that produce others, forming a string of misunderstandings and extravagances until arriving at the climax. To achieve this, he constructs each of the scenes with dislocated dialogues, bits of monologue, whispers, random words, ingenious and hysterical shadows, using the effects created by his beloved Ronald Firbank.
“A life of poverty, chastity and obedience.” It would no longer be necessary to resort to those penances after the publication of Decline and Fall. The novels that followed, Vile Bodies and Black Mischief, only augmented Waugh’s prestige and popularity. If works are an echo, a reflection of life, a compendium of all that the author is and has been, what he has seen, heard, dreamt, and felt, it is easy to discover though his books the surprising changes that occurred in the author’s conduct. His discourse changes, and his conception of the world becomes antagonistic to his previous one. To start, in London he went to homosexual parties and get-togethers, only to write about them acerbically in his diary and swear each time never to go back. On one occasion, he traveled with an actor to Paris, where on the very night of their arrival they set off for a male brothel. In his diary appears an exhausting review of the assortment of ephebes and the brazenness of the spectacle witnessed there, from which he left early because “the price proved prohibitive.”46 In 1927, during a visit to Greece, he receives a call from his closest friend during his time at Oxford, who held at the time a diplomatic post at the embassy in Athens; his friend’s apartment was always busy with a hive of Greek adolescents who repulsed him. These homoerotic relations outside of Oxford produced in him a feeling of profound disgust; they were entirely contrary to the student idylls of his adolescence. Upon returning from Greece, he decided that these experiences had reached their end. Shortly after, that same year, his brother Alec proposed a meeting in the South of France, and one night they visited a brothel in Marseille. Martin Stannard, the premier biographer of Waugh’s life, remarks that it was very likely on this occasion that the twenty-four-year-old established for the first time a sexual relationship with a woman.47
In the years that followed, the triumphant years, Waugh’s social life changes. He meets women, woos them, listens to them, entertains and dazzles them with his drollery and histrionics. The moment arrives when he falls in love and marries one of them. All his friends agree that they make a perfect couple; a lifelong alliance between two young and intelligent moderns, with a splendid sense of humor and shared interests. As in his novels, a few months later she confesses to him that she has a lover, a friend of both, and adds that she had only married him to escape her family’s tyranny. If this had happened in the past, his friends say, he would have been able to endure it like any of the many calamities he faced while awaiting the great opportunity that would change his life, but that moment had already arrived. De
cline and Fall was a complete success. As a result of this most recent disaster his personality changed, and with it also his literature.
He was on the verge of finishing another novel, Vile Bodies. The ridicule, the malicious jokes, the humiliation, the role once again as a buffoon in which he had been reincarnated caused intense distress. The traces of the blow were manifested in many ways. The next novel, Black Mischief, would be his last satirical novel of inordinate comicality and cruelty.
In 1930 he converted to Catholicism. He traveled often in the ensuing years: he took an extended tour of the Mediterranean on a yacht, spent a period of time in Morocco, toured several colonial territories in Africa, crossed the Atlantic to discover English Guyana, stayed a few weeks in a camp near the Brazil border, and wrote numerous chronicles and press articles. He became one of the highest paid journalists in England. He changed friends. He became a cultural emissary of the past, rejecting all that had excited him when he had dealings with Acton, except the baroque, because it was Jesuit, and the rococo, because it was its prolongation. He chose some favorite targets to attack: Picasso, Le Corbusier and all of modern architecture, Huxley, Auden and Isherwood, the West’s degenerate art. He mounted an attack on Europe’s softness. He interviewed Mussolini in Rome. He wrote against tolerance, against young people, against pacifist movements, against the exiguous and null masculinity of some contemporary writers. With Catholic ecclesiastical assistance, he managed to convince the Vatican to annul his marriage so he could marry again. And he did, to a woman of impeccable breeding and Catholic tradition, who as a dowry presented him with a splendid country estate, where he lived out the remainder of his life in opulence as a landowner. He applauded the fascists and declared himself a defender of Franco. With the support of English businesses expropriated during the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, he wrote a book on Mexico: Robbery under Law. The book received bad reviews in almost the entirety of the press and unanimous silence in Catholic publications, which led him not to republish it. A reading today of his political and partisan articles would produce an image contrary to that which it must have had at the time. Not only because of the hollowness of thought but because time has turned the highly favorable language of the causes he defended into parody. Like Gogol’s final book, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, written to gain favor with the autocratic circles of Russia and to be forgiven for those works that he was convinced were dictated by the devil: Dead Souls and The Inspector General. A book so inordinate in its praise that the result was fatal: the police, the Orthodox Church, the imperial family all believed that this accursed clown, Gogol, was endeavoring to mock religion and Holy Mother Russia.
The Magician of Vienna Page 17