The Magician of Vienna

by Pitol, Sergio; Henson, George; Bellatin, Mario

  The existing ideological tensions during the thirties took on a ferocious intensity. Political discourse in a large part of the world turned rhetorical, obtuse, and hollow. It was simplified to the risible. In England, one of the few exceptions was E. M. Forster, whose What I Believe and Two Cheers for Democracy still now maintain a radiant brilliance. Some liberal circles in England believed that Waugh had gone over to the extreme right due to the influence of the Jesuits, others out of snobbishness, and still others, his old friends, believing his personality to be excessively complex, refused to judge him. They hoped that time would cast light on his enigmas. To certain lucid conservatives he seemed a mere trifler. But to the obtuse radical right, to his political family and to his new friends, he must have seemed like a cross between Faith and Truth.

  In his memoirs, Anthony Powell refutes those arguments. He maintains that in Waugh’s behavior there existed nothing mysterious. On the contrary, in his way, what was extraordinary about him was his absolute absence of complexity. And his simplicity exposed itself especially in his way of judging social life. He understood it through absolute and immobile entitites, as when during a conversation he said: “a great nobleman,” “poor scholar,” “literary man of modest means”:

  The ‘high-life’ of Decline and Fall—Powell writes—is mostly depicted from imagination, hearsay, newspaper gossip-columns. Later, when Waugh himself had enjoyed a certain amount of first-hand experience of such circles, he was on the whole not much interested in their contradictions and paradoxes. He wished the beau monde to remain in the image he had formed, usually showing himself unwilling to listen if facts were offered that seemed to militate against that image. [In his second stage, that of a gentleman of the right, whose house was a palace and his wife an aristocrat, he felt that he must think and speak in the language of that class.] It was often hard to accept that some of the views and attitudes were serious. That was mistaken. They were perfectly serious to himself. [He had to behave this way, because, I imagine,] something always remained beneath the surface of a kind of social resentment. [Perhaps the only person who was unable to see it was he.]48

  Waugh’s first three novels: Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, and Black Mischief are noteworthy. His comicality is not peripheral nor much innocent like that of Wodehouse. His extremely agile language is always objective, acritical; it takes no side. His characters believe to be normal the most deplorable acts and any number of anomalous circumstances. Such is life, and to describe it in one way or another meant nothing, but in the undersoil run gusts of melancholy and exasperation that are felt in an oblique but powerful way. Surely that was what determined the immediate success of those books and their capacity to still remain alive today.

  The protagonist of Decline and Fall is Paul Pennyfeather, a student of theology at Oxford, who from childhood felt the calling of the Church and is preparing to be a minister. One night, in the midst of a kind of annual pogrom in which the athletes of the university, invigorated by alcohol and a consciousness of a triumphant virility, rush to punish savagely the aesthetes, trashing their rooms, smashing their antique china, their Matisses, their grand pianos, their bibliographic treasures; the young Pennyfeather returns to his room after participating in a debate on universal peace, and is trapped by some ferocious crusaders who wish to rid their university of womanly refinements; they trounce him, insult him with horrendous words, and in the end remove his trousers. The guardians of order have the obligation to punish the predators, but they do not dare blame those students of respectable names and titles, who, otherwise, were always generous with their tips, but rather this modest boy whom they saw walking at night “without trousers” through the University’s quadrangles. Paul Pennyfeather, needless to say, is an angelic character. Compared to him, Myshkin, the Russian prince, the idiot, would have been a reprobate. He is immediately expelled for indecent behavior. His uncle and guardian, as punishment, seizes the inheritance, of which he is custodian, that his parents have left him, arguing that a young man who has already demonstrated the worst vices, would, having money, plunge headlong into debauchery, and so the innocent youth is cast defenseless to the elements. Thereafter, without knowledge of the world or the perversions that dwell there, he moves amid a savage cast, corrupt to the core, masked, but remarkably amusing, of whose existence he hadn’t the foggiest notion. He senses, and ultimately must recognize, that the world is infinitely more complicated than anything he and his colleagues with whom he sparred so earnestly in the Debating Society might have supposed. He encountered almost from the beginning quite bizarre circumstances. Even had he lived a dozen lives, had he not been expelled for so ignominious of charges from the university, he would never have discovered a web of sordidness and felicity like that which heaven had brought him. He quickly comes to rub elbows with figures who make up the upper echelons of a powerful society: he lived in the Ritz, traveled by yacht, was on the verge of marrying one of the most beautiful women in England, a hostess whose house was visited by the highest rungs of society; he lodged one season in a magnificent house on a Greek island; but he also descended into hell, convicted of the crime, no less, of white slave trafficking; he became acquainted with jail and some of its secrets, where he encountered some of the characters whom he had known for such a short time. If he had read Calderón, he would have thought he was a new incarnation of Segismundo. He was astonished, indeed, that in this game of dreams society was driven by powerful invisible currents. In his dealings with the world he was able to detect the existence of a savage vitality hidden by exquisite manners and tasteful frivolity, embodied in a woman slave-trader, a swindler, and a pederast. And, in addition, in order for the human comedy to follow its normal course, it was necessary that some prestigious institutions and the uppermost powers be implicated in that evil life. Only in this way could the precious façade be maintained.

  In a way, this first novel is a preface to the next: Vile Bodies, published in 1930. Several characters from Decline and Fall reappear in it, as secondary figures from the milieu of the groups of young people from prominent families who in the press and in many circles are known by the sobriquet “Bright Young People.” Some admire them, envy their freedom, their fortune, their eccentricity, their zest for life, their courage to allow themselves to discard Victorian habits and customs.

  Vile Bodies is more daring that the preceding novel. Its structure is formed by a concert of voices, murmurings, and journalistic quotes that surround the characters known as the “Bright Young People.” The gossip columnists are the imposing pillars that proclaim their brilliance, their strength, their insolence, and also their self-destructive vocation.

  The novel begins one stormy night on a boat trip from Calais to Dover. Several of the plot’s participants make up the substantive part of the work’s cast. Mrs. Ape (señora Simia in Spanish) and her string of evangelical angels, on a tour of Europe; Father Rothschild, a mysterious, extremely erudite, and elusive Jesuit; some of the most conspicuous representatives of the “Bright Young People”: Agatha Runcible, Miles Malpractice, and Adam Fenwick-Symes, who is returning from France with an autobiography that he’s to publish in London. From the beginning, the novel is already a festive march of scenes of frenzied comicality: the hymn that Mrs. Ape and her angels sing, which they oblige the other passengers to sing amid their travel sickness, is nothing less than the director’s most fortunate composition: “There ain’t no flies in the Lamb of God.” The descriptions and dialogues mark a greater distance from realism than his first novel. In general, personal encounters become elusive, biased, deaf; the dialogues insinuate more than they state. There are no protagonists to speak of; they are replaced by a kind of colored-paper cutout; those who most closely resemble traditional characters of an English novel are a couple: Adam Fenwick-Symes and Nina Blount, who wish to get married and can’t, until they acquire the minimum financial resources to support themselves. There is not a single chapter in which this situation doesn’t change at least once
. Every day the possibility of becoming rich presents itself, only to disappear moments later. And in the face of so much uncertainty, the bride-to-be accepts the proposal of marriage from a mutual friend. She marries, discovers during the honeymoon that her husband bores her, stays married in exchange for material security, but revives a sexual relationship with her beloved Adam. Everything falls into place. Nina becomes pregnant, and her husband is content to be expecting a child, which of course is not his.

  The cast of Vile Bodies is extensive. A compact tribe: “the Bright Young People,” who circulate incessantly amid frivolity, dilettantism, and debauchery. They speak a coded language that to their parents is undecipherable. Triviality reigns. They’ve been liberated, or so they say at every opportunity, but they act like a herd. A privileged space is wherever a party is held. To live outside a party is to live in error. But whether a party is a real party depends on the press, on the society column of any important newspaper. Without these columnists, high society would not exist. Both hosts and guests depend on them, the hostess’ success or failure, the recognition of her efforts, the just prize or, in other cases, the disaster. The gossip writer can be a dictator, an inquisitor, a man of enormous power, and at the same time a tremendously vulnerable person. In the six weeks during which the plot unfolds, an important newspaper has changed its gossip writer three times: the first committed suicide, the second was fired, and the third fled the country.

  (…Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St. John’s Wood, parties in flats and studies and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs. In windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris—all that succession and repetition of massed humanity… Those vile bodies…)

  During the course of a party, in some remote drawing room, serious people treat important topics, they discuss the topics of the present and the future, only to arrive always at the topic of the current youth, the gay, the bright, and the frivolous modern youth, so different than their own. The ministers, the Jesuits, the businessmen, the publishers of the press become worried: if these young men were to become the men of tomorrow the country would be lost.

  Waugh was an enthusiastic and careful reader of Firbank. In his youth, when the writer, the eccentric of all eccentrics, was all but forgotten, Waugh wrote a magnificent essay on him. In Vile Bodies there are echoes of him, which at times seem to be a tribute. Above all, in the dialogues. During a party, two gossip writers have a conversation:

  “Who’s that awful-looking woman? I’m sure she’s famous in some way. It’s not Mrs. Melrose Ape, is it? I heard she was coming.”

  “Who?”

  “That one. Making up to Nina.”

  “Good lord, no. She’s no one. Mrs. Panrast she’s called now.”

  “She seems to know you.”

  “Yes, I’ve known her all my life. As a matter of fact, she’s my mother.”

  “My dear, how too shaming. D’you mind if I put that in?”

  “I’d sooner you didn’t. The family can’t bear her. She’s been divorced twice since then, you know.”

  “My dear, of course not, I quite understand.”

  It must be clarified that in the life of a “bright young person” not everything is sunshine and rainbows. There are cruel moments, and it is necessary to suffer them with a stiff upper lip; one mustn’t flinch in the face of any setback. According to Waugh the novel takes place from the 10th of November to the 25th of December. In that brief timespan, the list of mishaps suffered by Agatha Runcible, the daughter of Lord Chan, a distinguished peer of the realm, is vast: upon arriving at Dover, in the boat in which a good part of the cast is traveling and passing through English customs, she’s confused for a dangerous jewel smuggler; she’s detained, searched, subjected to a degrading gynecological examination, in order to determine that the jewels were not hidden “there” where they believed them to be. The evening newspapers break the news and exaggerate the maneuvers perpetrated against her body, which are not at all pleasant. That same night she goes in search of a friend at the hotel belonging to Lottie Crump, who, in the presence of people of great import, among them a king living in exile, shouts: “Who’s that tart?” and points to Agatha. “Will you please leave my house immediately!” which was not at all amusing. As she leaves the party, she noticed that she had lost her latchkey. She goes with friends in search of a bar to get some drinks; then a young woman she doesn’t know invites the group for a drink at her house, and, of course, they accept. Since she has no key she asks for permission to sleep there. Agatha was dressed in a Hawaiian costume, covered only in garlands of equatorial flowers. As she leaves the next morning, a dozen cameras drown her in flashes. The young woman who invited them did not warn them that she was the daughter of the Prime Minister, and that the house, consequently, was the home and office of the head of government. Every newspaper published on the front page the news that the Prime Minister was throwing “midnight orgies” until the wee hours of the morning and therefore should resign his post. An unseemly photo of a half-naked Agatha appeared on the front page. Days later, there was a party in a dirigible, with too many invitees and an excess of sharp angles. Within the first half hour the indefatigable Agatha is transformed into an ugly mass of bruises. And, to top it all off, they go to the countryside to watch a motor race. When they arrive they find neither a hotel nor a restaurant. They have no choice but to drink in squalid pubs. On the day of the race everyone is soused, especially Agatha; an acquaintance has secured them a good place to watch the cars’ start and the finish. They place a brassard on Agatha’s arm that reads: Spare Driver. One of the racers can’t finish the race; Agatha steps up and says that she’ll drive the car to victory. She shows her brassard and insists that they let her pass, she leaps into the car and steps on the accelerator. Then, for a time, no one has word of her. The car is discovered in a neighboring village, and several days pass before they discover that she’s been admitted to a nursing home. They had found her in the village railway station with a concussion, saying that she had no name, muttering nonsense, so they took her to the clinic, where they found in her purse a document with her name; she had broken both legs, little by little regained her memory, calmed down, the poor dear was very sad, yes, they could visit her in the nursing home, that would cheer her up, her friends arrived with a gramophone, whiskey, caviar, other delicacies, and her room was transformed into a party, the patient moved spellbound, from her bed, both legs in casts, to the rhythm of jazz, the guests, the doctors, and the nurses drank without respite, no one knew when she became delirious, but suddenly someone said that she looked very bad and, indeed, she was. That night she died. An anonymous heroine of modernity!

  The epilogue of Vile Bodies takes place in a field of ruins where a handful of bright young people attempt to escape the din of battle. The party had come to an end.

  They’re carnivalesque farces, an uncommon adjective for the literature of the time. They’re black comedies, but their delirious, absurd, yet convincing situations soar toward other horizons; at moments they’re caricatures that surpass genre due to their author’s masterful imaginative capacity; they’re social satires; they’re metaphors for a winsome, dangerous, and treasonous age. What makes them brilliant is that what the author condemns seems to be a part of himself. One notices the mix of disgust and attraction that this insane world produces in him. They are, when all is said and done, a kind of humor that anticipates the Marx brothers and the theater of the absurd.

  The third novel, Black Mischief, takes place in Azania, a fictional country in Africa, where Basil Seal arrives as an adviser to the new emperor, Seth, who, like Seal, was a student at Oxford. Seal, who appears for t
he first time in this book, is the epitome of the Waughian rogues, a Don Juan, a rascal, the scion of a great family, a young man from a small world, but extremely dangerous for whomever falls into his clutches. In a later novel, Put More Flags, he behaves monstrously. Nevertheless, instead of treating his nasty deeds with melodrama, Waugh treats them comically. He has lived and lives in particular off women: his mother, his sister, his mistresses. They all adore him, and even if they come to hate him, it’s impossible for them to live without his company. There is no project of Basil Seal that is not perverse, but he never achieves victory. At the end of each of his exploits he fails resoundingly and must go into hiding at the home of a friend or mistress, or escape abroad, to the darkest corner of the world, having left in the worst of situations members of his family, friends, or whatever acquaintance or stranger who has believed his words. In Azania he fell in love chastely, for the first time, with a pure and winsome young woman, the daughter of the English ambassador. On the eve of a revolution that places the capital in danger, the embassy staff, the English missionaries, and some British visitors are evacuated by air. One of the airplanes makes an emergency landing in a field because of mechanical problems. Seal isn’t able to fly with the others; he has an appointment with the emperor in a remote village in the middle of the jungle. Upon arriving at the site he learns that Seth has died. They ask him to stay so he can deliver the final eulogy to the fallen emperor. The ceremony is magnificent. Even more extraordinary is the barbarous nocturnal feast. The area’s settlers drink, eat, and dance until falling into terrifying trances. Seal sees in the chief’s hands a beret that his beloved was wearing when she boarded the plane. Desperate, he begins to shake him violently, demanding that he tell him how he obtained the garment and where the white woman who was wearing it was.