by William Boyd
Solipsistic, egalitarian, existential, democratic, esoteric, insouciant, disinterested, cheap—what kind of establishment offers you all this, plus baked beans, chips, fried bread, sausage, bacon, fried eggs, mushrooms, black pudding, bread and margarine, HP and tomato sauce and a chipped Pyrex cup of stewed tea? We should preserve these singular, beguiling places before they disappear but—and this is what adds the bizarre magic—how could you possibly achieve that? The very attempt to cherish and enshrine or consecrate removes everything special, destroys the quiddity of the establishment at once. It is as if there is a built-in, anti-tamper, self-destruct device designed to counteract our best arty-liberal-bourgeois intentions. The caff has evolved in these islands of its own accord—organically, mysteriously, almost unnoticed—and if one day it becomes extinct it will have been something self-willed, a kind of benign suicide, not driven out, not victim of an enforced, unnatural transformation, part radical chic, part heritage industry. All we can do is watch and contemplate these remarkable loci of our urban lives carefully, see how they adapt and change or die away, log and note them for posterity—and make sure to go in from time to time.
1998
Evelyn Waugh (2)
In 1971 Cyril Connolly flew to the University of Austin, Texas, to view an exhibition of first editions of key twentieth-century works of literature inspired by his book The Modern Movement. Immodestly, Connolly had asked that one of his own books be included and suggested his “word-cycle” The Unquiet Grave, published in 1944. The university duly agreed and, having purchased Evelyn Waugh’s library on his death, decided to display Waugh’s own heavily annotated copy of The Unquiet Grave, sent to him on publication by Nancy Mitford. Connolly read the copious marginalia with horrid fascination: he was shocked and appalled at the cold dismissiveness and abuse they contained. Amongst the aspersions were “Irish corner boy,” “hack highbrow,” “drivelling woman novelist.” Writing about the experience later Connolly commented: “What I minded most was the contempt that emerged from a writer for whom for twenty years I had looked on as a friend.” He conjured up a demonic image of Waugh, contemplating the “bloated, puffed-up face of my old club-mate, the beady eyes red with wine and anger, the cigar jabbing as he went in for the attack.” Friends rallied, contrary and consoling alternative judgements were proffered. Waugh, it was generally agreed, was a venomous parvenu consumed by envy and snobbery.
I cite this anecdote because this portrait of Waugh still rings true, and it continues to represent for many the abiding image of the writer, born a hundred years ago on 28 October 1903. The fact that it does is in large part down to Waugh himself. The persona he created for himself in the later stages of his life was an elaborate construct—full of contradictions—but calculated to stir up derision, confusion and animosity amongst his perceived enemies. It was at times so close to the absurd, to the caricature (the bookie’s tweeds, the hearing trumpet, the brandished cigars) that its very artifice seemed to be designed to be exposed. Anthony Powell—who was always acutely perceptive about his peers—wrote about Connolly and Waugh, saying that both men were “mesmerised by beau monde mystique, both in their different ways fundamentally ill-at-ease there, unless in a position to perform his own individual act, put on a turn, in fact.”
“Putting on a turn” is what Evelyn Waugh did for most of his adult life and it had many manifestations: country squire, iconoclastic Tory, devout Catholic, fearless soldier, virulent anti-modernist, stern paterfamilias, rural anchorite, senile patrician and so on. Why he did this, and why he did it so assiduously, is a matter for endless debate (we all have our theories) but the consequences have not helped his posthumous reputation: the man, I feel, has in recent years shouldered the work aside—the life has become more compelling than the fiction.
The problem is that we know an enormous amount about Evelyn Waugh—we have the letters, the diaries, the collected journalism, five large biographies, let alone the memoirs of friends and neighbours—perhaps only Virginia Woolf of twentieth-century English writers has been more compendiously documented. This is a genuine shame because, however diverting the show might be, the spectacle of Evelyn Waugh guying or exploiting various forms of eccentric Englishness detracts serious attention from a fascinating and enduring body of work. Waugh’s debut was assured and precocious. His first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), published when the author was twenty-five years old set the style and the tone for the string of great comedies that followed: Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932) and Scoop (1938). In between Black Mischief and Scoop, however, came A Handful of Dust (1934), considered by many to be Waugh’s “best” novel. I don’t agree: I see the novel as an uneven and semi-disguised act of revenge against Waugh’s first wife, whom he divorced after a year of marriage in 1928. Despite its modishly nihilistic superstructure (the title coming from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land) it is essentially a society novel about an adulterous wife and the bleak consequences of that betrayal. It also heralded the concerns of his later work—a building religious dimension, a hatred of the new, a fawning admiration of the aristocratic past—that reached an early apotheosis in Brideshead Revisited (1945, considered by many to be his worst novel) and was continued and refined in the Sword of Honour trilogy. Scoop is, in my opinion, his real masterwork. It has a classical and deeply satisfying shapeliness but also contains sequences of hilarious comic writing unrivalled in English literature. As it turned out it was to be his final, sustained essay in the comic form. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) forms a strange coda to these four great comedies but is really too idiosyncratic to be truly cognate with them.
A hundred years on from Waugh’s birth and thirty-seven from his death it is perhaps timely to assess the measure of his achievement, to see how the work has survived. The “Brideshead myth” will, I suppose, always be the first aspect of Waugh’s output that seems the most visible if not the most significant. Yet a moment’s reflection—or a few pages of rereading—will expose the book as flawed and self-serving. It was conceived in wartime as an act of nostalgic recall, of rose-tinted reveries of a never-never-land Oxford (Waugh himself admitted as much). In a later edition he tried to curb the excesses and strip away as much as he could of what was lush and verbose but with little success. The subsequent television version in the 1980s only served to reinforce the sentimental romance. The book’s huge success was always rather embarrassing to Waugh: he was grateful for the revenue but vaguely ashamed of the way it was acquired. He never attempted such panting excesses again. Brideshead’s love affair with aristocratic virtues was dramatically honed down in the Sword of Honour trilogy. Claret, teddy bears and stately homes devolve into Mr Crouchback’s austere injunction “not to repine.” Lyrical upper-class hedonism gives way to an unbending and stoical faith in God’s edict and man’s duty to God on earth. To a non-believing or even agnostic reader the trilogy’s moral underpinnings appear close to mumbo-jumbo, but to anyone familiar with Waugh’s life they reflect his almost manic piety: he clung to his demanding faith with the tenacity of a drowning man to a piece of driftwood.
The contrast with the later novels and the early comedies is acute. What makes the four novels of 1928–38 so continuously readable is their tone of voice. Waugh sees the world as fundamentally absurd and indifferent to mankind’s fate. With this in mind the comedy is triumphantly dark and pitiless: the evil thrive, the innocent are punished. Happiness is transitory or delusional; hopes, dreams and ambitions are redundant in the face of an uncaring, cruel and arbitrary universe. Waugh didn’t invent this point of view: one could argue that it first received its full fictional expression in the mature short stories of Anton Chekhov. The great follower of Chekhov at the time Waugh was beginning his writing career was the now forgotten William Gerhardie. Later in life Waugh admitted his debt to Gerhardie’s early novels—Futility, The Polyglots, Jazz and Jasper (published to huge acclaim in the early twenties). It was not so much a question of borrowing (though a lot of Jazz and Jasper has slip
ped into Vile Bodies and Scoop) but of seizing on an authorial point of view that Waugh found entirely congenial. Gerhardie did not have Waugh’s talent as a writer but he saw the world in the same absurdist, amoral way and, like Chekhov, refused to pass judgement on his characters and their actions. For the young Evelyn Waugh it must have come both as a recognition and a revelation: the tone of voice in Decline and Fall is so assured because it had already been aired and developed by Gerhardie. Waugh applied it to his own fictional ends and hit the ground running.
Waugh was received into the Catholic Church in 1930 after the humiliation of the collapse of his first marriage. He was, by all accounts, a diligent and sincere neophyte but the religiosity that makes its first pronounced appearance in Brideshead is absent from the three comedies he published in the decade following his conversion. The world of the comedies is, in effect, Godless. Indeed one might claim that it is a precondition of comedy that it is, covertly or not, atheistical: based on the premise that no omnipotent god could possibly have created or be responsible for the ghastly and rebarbative world we live in. However, Waugh’s developing obsession with his faith meant that the comedy in his work becomes intermittent and less successful: it lacks the cool, gimlet-eyed dispassion of the earlier works. As Waugh’s novels became more self-consciously serious—as God entered the frame—so they began to creak and sag.
Perhaps this was inevitable. Waugh is the most autobiographical of fiction writers and as he reached middle age so he began to be afflicted by melancholia and taedium vitae. Only his unbending religious beliefs offered him any kind of support. His son Auberon speculated that perhaps his father might actually have been clinically depressed—though he would never have admitted it and indeed the only medication he permitted himself for his condition was regular large measures of gin and lemon barley water.
In his writing life a similar zeal attached itself to the concept of style. Waugh saw himself as a craftsman whose medium was the English language: someone responsible for shaping a coherent sentence, choosing the exact words to convey the exact meaning the author implied. No language was richer and more suited to the task than English—“The most lavish and delicate which mankind has ever known.” And Waugh is a consummate artist but within a particularly confined manner of English prose—he strove to write in an almost mock-Augustan idiom, sometimes beautiful and classically severe but sometimes verging on parody where too many Latinate orotundities tend to bleed the life from the fiction. As Thomas Hardy once tellingly remarked, “If you want to have a living style then it’s important not to have too much style.”
In this centenary year of Waugh’s birth, therefore, I feel it’s necessary to push to one side the image of Waugh the tweeded, social-climbing bully, and even Waugh the self-appointed guardian of the English language. Why we continue to read Waugh is why we are drawn to all great novelists: namely that in their fiction they tell us truths about our human nature and the human condition. Waugh’s perfect medium in this endeavour was comedy and what made his comedy so alluring in the 1930s is as true in 2003 as it was then. Reflecting on his father’s life and its litany of hostilities and antagonisms, Auberon Waugh wrote how sad that it should have been so when “one reflects that all he really wanted to do …was to make jokes, to turn the world upside down and laugh at it and enliven this vale of tears with a little fantasy.” This would also pass muster as a fair summation of the effect of his comic novels. But, fantastical though they are, the fantasy is founded on a bedrock of precise observation and unflinching honesty. And it is this element in Waugh—his fundamental and unsparing honesty—that I find so compelling and admirable. The various poses and images of himself that he presented to the world were deliberately provocative, not to say deliberately preposterous. But this honesty meant that nobody was more aware of the sham and the bogus than Waugh himself. And there is no better proof than his late self-portrait in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: he knew himself better than anyone. Gilbert Pinfold is the record of an actual attack of dementia that Waugh suffered but it is also a merciless depiction of the author in middle age. All criticisms of the man are pre-empted because the most devastating come from the man himself. And the same unblinking candour informs his dark, comic vision also. He saw the world and its denizens with absolute clarity and absolute unsentimentality—nowhere more so than in the great comedies where he displayed the nature of our short lives on this small planet with gleeful ruthlessness. This is what makes him, I think, an enduringly modern spirit (however paradoxical that adjective might seem when applied to Evelyn Waugh) and explains why the comic novels continue to beguile readers—provoking both laughter and serious reflection—and will continue to survive.
2003
Minicabs
Picture the scene. It is late at night, two or three in the morning and I am almost the last guest at a bibulous dinner party in north London. I need to get back home to Chelsea. I turn to the host: “I’d better call a cab,” I say. “Don’t worry,” he replies, “we have a local firm. Here in five minutes.” True enough, five minutes later there is a peremptory honking in the street. I make my farewells and go out to find my minicab. The car is not difficult to locate—double-parked and throbbing with muffled techno-pop. I slide into the back seat—apparently springless. Indeed the car, an indeterminate, currently unrecognizable model, appears to sit surprisingly low on its haunches, a real road-scraper.
The driver is smoking; the tearing, harsh voice of the dispatcher fizzles from the radio. “Where to?” the driver asks. The accent is foreign, foreign to London, anyway—the accents tend to come from far and wide, from Leeds, Aberdeen, Belgrade, Lagos, Kingston, Larnaca, Islamabad, Kiev. “Chelsea,” I reply. The set of the shoulders betokens no familiarity with this destination. “South-west London,” I add. “Embankment?” says the driver. “Get me to the Embankment and I can give you directions,” I say breezily, and settle back, noticing for the first time the curious smell—frowsty, farinaceous—here in the rear of this unclas-sifiable saloon, as if someone had cooked a spicy meal in the back of the car last week. Indeed, the material—the carpet—beneath my feet feels moist and tacky. I keep my hands in my lap and we pull away.
“POB,” the driver says into the handset of his radio. I know this means “passenger on board”—everybody knows this, so why the coy acronym? Then there is a fair bit of “Chelsea, yeah, Chelsea. Roger, Rog,” and the mike is rehung.
We drive crazily south, at high, reckless speed. I vaguely recognize the North Circular, Islington Green, then the Barbican, then the towers of Canary Wharf begin to loom closer. “Where are you going?” I ask, baffled. “Embankment,” comes the reply. “This is the wrong way,” I advise.
So, we turn and make our zig-zag way back to the West End, Parliament Square, Big Ben—now I know where I am and give confident instructions from the rear seat. The car is still being driven with adolescent disregard—exaggerated wheel-turn, heavy braking, muttered oaths. We pull up outside my house, a preposterous sum of money is demanded as the fare and a hostile altercation ensues. I see lights going on in my neighbours’ windows as the rhythmic thud of techno-pop rouses them from their beds. A compromise, but still-too-high figure is agreed (no tip) and no pen or paper is present either to furnish me with a receipt. I leave the car exhausted, frazzled, nervy, angry. I have just been mini-cabbed.
Admittedly, this scenario is an aggregate of several bad minicab journeys I’ve made—a nightmare amalgam of fear, irritation and noisome frustration—but aspects of this experience will ring true to almost everyone, I would claim. At some stage in their lives every Briton has been or will be minicabbed in a similar way. This, of course, is the downside of the minicab experience: there’s an upside too which we mustn’t forget (handy, cheapish, friendly, nearly always available). And “forget” is the key word, because the minicab, as we love and loathe it, will not be around for much longer: another quintessentially British phenomenon is about to be legislated—not out of existence—but into so
mething safer, surer, more user-friendly. The minicab is going to become a pseudo-taxi.
From this time next year (approximately September 2002) all minicabs will have to be licensed (in fact minicab firms are meant to have had their licence applications in by now but there has been some foot-dragging). But, within a year, as far as I understand it, all the new licensed minicabs will have to display a plate on the rear bumper; it will be permissible to hail them in the street; insurance will be checked and verified by the local council; there will be possibly two mandatory MOTs a year (at least one) and there may even be a meter to regulate fares. It will not be the same thing at all.
I came to live in London in 1983, in Fulham, and there was a minicab office at the end of our street. I’m a non-driver and so this firm (let’s call them Ferret Cars) became one of my principal modes of transport around London. I opened an account with them (I still have an account with them). I came to know the drivers well—it was quite a small firm in the eighties (it’s rather flash and grand now, with a huge fleet)—and, equally, they came to know me. I learned of their many travails and woes—whose marriage was on the ropes, who was gambling away his wages, who was drinking too much, who was going to get fired and so on. The drivers became familiar to me almost as friends are: Tommy, with his shocking emphysema; Jeremy, the redundant City trader, working a twenty-hour day to repay his debts; Trevor, who as I approached his car would greet me with a stiff-armed salute and a shout “Heil Hitler”; Ben the worldly and cynical ex-police sergeant from Antigua … because I used minicabs so frequently I grew to know them all. Ferret Cars and their drivers inexorably became part of my life.