by David Lodge
Another development in technology which left its mark on Waugh’s fiction was the telephone. He was perhaps the first literary novelist to exploit this instrument on a significant scale to dramatise failures of communication, either deliberate or involuntary, between characters. Much of the courtship between Adam and Nina is conducted by phone, and one short chapter (11) consists entirely of two such conversations. Behind the clipped, banal phrases—“We aren’t going to be married today?” “No.” “I see.” “Well?” “I said, I see.” “Is that all?” “Yes, that’s all, Adam.” “I’m sorry.” “Yes, I’m sorry too. Goodbye.” “Goodbye Nina”—there are depths of unspoken pain and betrayal. The phrases “Well” and “I see,” which have a merely phatic function in the conversation, acquire an ironic and poignant resonance, for nothing is well and these interlocutors cannot see each other.
In the 1930s, Waugh’s professional life fell into a certain pattern: he would go abroad, write a travel book about his experiences, and then rework the material in a novel. In 1930 he was sent to Abyssinia by a newspaper to report on the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie I. His nonfiction account of this trip was Remote People (1931), and its fictional fruit was Black Mischief (1932). Abyssinia is transformed into Azania, an island state off the coast of East Africa, whose young monarch, the Emperor Seth, is infatuated with western ideas of Progress and strives vainly to impose them on his still primitive subjects. He orders his commander-in-chief, General Connolly, to issue boots to the army and equip it with a tank. The tank cannot operate in jungle terrain and is useful only as a punishment cell; the soldiers assume the boots are extra rations and eat them. Seth’s campaign to introduce contraception misfires when the people misinterpret his posters, with their before-and-after illustrations of the advantages of using condoms.
See: on right hand: there is rich man: smoke pipe like big chief: but his wife she no good; sit eating meat; and rich man no good: he only one son.
See: on left hand: poor man: not much to eat: but his wife she very good, work hard in field: man he good too: eleven children; one very mad, very holy. And in the middle: Emperor’s juju. Make you like that good man with eleven children.
It is easy to mistake this comedy for a display of racial prejudice. There is no doubt that Evelyn Waugh, like most Englishmen of his class and time, harboured a measure of such prejudice. But his imagination was more even-handed. It was the clash of different cultures in colonial and post-colonial Africa, all seeking to exploit each other, that fascinated Waugh, because it generated so many delicious incongruities, absurdities, and contradictions in human behaviour. In Africa, he found, the comedy of manners bordered on the surreal. Only in Alice in Wonderland, Waugh wrote in Remote People, could he find a “parallel for life in Addis Ababa . . . the peculiar flavour of galvanised and translated reality.”
Seth defines his struggle as “a war of Progress against Barbarism.” Waugh shows that progress is usually only another form of barbarism. Certainly its representatives in Azania are hardly to its credit: the sublimely lazy and inefficient British legation, the self-important, self-deceiving French legation, or the Englishman who becomes Seth’s right-hand man, Basil Seal. As a novel, Black Mischief suffers perhaps from not having a really sympathetic character, unless it is the down-to-earth General Connolly. Instead of a reactive, victimized hero, we have in this book a totally amoral anti-hero, a “corker” but a cad, to whom deception and the double cross are second nature. Basil’s romance with Prudence, the British Ambassador’s daughter, lacks the underlying poignancy of the relationship between Adam and Nina in Vile Bodies, but this absence licences one of the blackest reversals in the history of comedy, when he unknowingly eats her flesh at a cannibal feast.
In the winter of 1932–33, Waugh made a trip to British Guiana and Brazil to gather material for a travel book (92 Days). In the course of an otherwise uneventful trek through the jungle, he encountered a lonely settler whose eccentric and slightly sinister demeanour gave him the idea for a short story about an explorer who is held captive by such a man and is made to read the entire works of Dickens aloud at gunpoint. The idea continued to fascinate him, and in due course he wrote a novel, in his own words, “to discover how the prisoner got there, and eventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savage at home and the civilized man’s helpless plight among them.” The novel was A Handful of Dust (1934), and the “civilized man” is Tony Last, proud owner of Hetton Abbey, a hideously ugly Victorian fake-gothic country house, happily married (or so he thinks) to Brenda. In fact Brenda, a kind of aristocratic latter-day Emma Bovary, is bored and restless, unable to share Tony’s enthusiasm for Hetton and the archaic lord-of-the-manor life-style that he tries to keep up on an insufficient income. She starts an affair with the unremarkable and effete John Beaver because he offers her some escape from the crippling ennui of her domestic life, and re-entry into the shallow, sophisticated pleasures of London high society. Tony is easily deceived because he “had got into the habit of loving and trusting Brenda,” but a tragic accident to their son, John Andrew, precipitates an open breach.
Of all Waugh’s novels, A Handful of Dust draws most deeply on the traumatic breakdown of his own first marriage, which makes the poise of the book—its subtle balancing and tight control of the tragic and the comic, the emotional and the satirical—all the more remarkable. Waugh’s technique of staying on the surface, giving the minimum of information about the characters’ thoughts and feelings, making the reader draw the appropriate conclusions from what they say and do, prevents the novel from becoming excessively emotional or moralistic. We never, for instance, get direct access to Brenda’s mind or heart. The first indication that she is attracted to Beaver comes from a conversation with her sister Marjorie in which she first denies, and then half-admits, that she “fancies” him; and when she fails to mention on returning home to Tony that she met Beaver in London, we realise that she has embarked on a course of deception. Marjorie irresponsibly encourages the affair, then tries to effect a reconciliation—too late and for the wrong reasons. “Of course Brenda doesn’t love Beaver. How could she?” Marjorie says to Tony. “And if she thinks she does at the moment, it’s your duty to prevent her making a fool of herself. You must refuse to be divorced—anyway, until she has found someone more reasonable.” The callousness, snobbishness, and arrogance of that afterthought make it a devastating indictment of Marjorie and her set.
The only point at which, it seems to me, Waugh is unfair to Brenda—when, in D. H. Lawrence’s phrase, he “puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection,”4 is the climactic moment when she is told that “John” has been killed in an accident, and presumes it is her lover. When her informant clearly implies that in fact it is her son who is dead, “She frowned, not at once taking in what he was saying. ‘John . . . John Andrew . . . I . . . Oh thank God . . .’ Then she burst into tears.” I don’t believe that any mother, however cold-hearted and selfish, would say “thank God” in these circumstances. But I have not encountered any other reader who feels the same, and indeed this scene is often cited admiringly as an example of Waugh’s irony.
Our sympathies are naturally drawn to the innocent party in the triangle, Tony Last, and it is hard to suppress a cheer when, by a brilliant narrative reversal, he turns the tables on Brenda’s selfish and grasping family and friends. But it is important to recognize that he is portrayed as a weak and limited man in many respects, and that his cult of Hetton is exposed as a self-indulgent illusion. “A whole Gothic world had come to grief” in the collapse of his marriage, for which he must bear some of the blame. That is why, in the novel’s design, he is punished by the grotesque fate that awaits him in the depths of the South American jungle. Both Tony and Brenda are shown to be fundamentally immature, reverting to nursery rituals in times of stress, and both are shown weeping with self-pity, like children, when their fortunes reach their lowest ebb. Waugh later said of A Handful of Dust that “
it was humanist and contained all I had to say about humanism.”5 What he implied was that, without a transcendental religious faith, humanism was helpless in the face of human weakness, evil, and death. His title was taken from The Waste Land, the work of another literary convert to Christian orthodoxy: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” This work, considered by most critics to be one of Waugh’s finest achievements, is certainly the most serious and complex of the early novels.
With Scoop (1938) Waugh returned to a more purely comic mode. “It is light and excellent,” he commented in his diary early in its composition, and he was right. For this novel he drew on the experience of two more visits which he made to Abyssinia in the 1930s, as a correspondent reporting the Italian invasion and occupation of that country for The Daily Mail. This campaign was, like the Spanish Civil War, part of the political preliminaries to the Second World War, and in Scoop there is a good deal of topical satire at the expense of both Fascist and Communist ideologies. Essentially, however, it is, as its subtitle declares, “a novel about journalists,” and has achieved immortality as such. Many journalists consider it the best novel ever written about their profession. The engine of the plot—a case of mistaken identity, which sends the retiring nature columnist of the Daily Beast, William Boot, to the war-threatened African state of Ishmaelia instead of the fashionable novelist John Boot—is one of the oldest in comic literature, and is, in the cold light of reason, highly implausible. So are many other events in the story. That doesn’t matter in the least. As the very name of the fictitious newspaper implies, the novel is not meant to be soberly realistic. Waugh’s comic genius allowed him to invent fantastic incidents which seem only slightly exaggerated in the reading, because they have a representative truthfulness. One might cite as an example the embedded anecdote of the legendary ace reporter Wesley Jakes, who started a revolution by accidentally filing a story from the wrong country. The basic message of the book is that newspapers construct the reality they claim to report—not (as modern media studies often claim) for sinister ideological reasons, but because they are so obsessed with the mystique of their trade—the need to entertain their readers, to scoop their competitors, and so on—that they make gross errors of fact and interpretation all the time. It is precisely because he is not a professional journalist that William Boot stumbles on the truth about Ishmaelian politics; but at one exquisitely ironic point in the narrative he is unable to publish a true story about a Russian agent operating in the capital because a false story to the same effect has already been circulated and then denied. The whole novel is a tissue of mistakes, misrepresentations, lies, and evasions. Mr. Salter’s formula for dealing with his employer’s gross misconceptions, “Up to a point, Lord Copper,” has deservedly become proverbial.
Put Out More Flags (1942) is a kind of epilogue or envoi to the sequence of novels that began with Decline and Fall. In it, Waugh revived several characters from the previous books, like Basil Seal, Peter Pastmaster, Alastair and Sonia Trumpington, invented a lot of new ones (notably the homosexual aesthete Ambrose Silk), and exhibited this large cast reacting in various ways to the outbreak of World War II. Most of them are ill-prepared for the crisis—including the soldiers:
Freddy was in uniform, acutely uncomfortable in ten-year-old trousers. He had been to report at the yeomanry headquarters the day before, and was home for two nights collecting his kit, which, in the two years since he was last at camp, had been misused in charades and picnics and dispersed about the house in a dozen improbable places. His pistol, in particular, had been a trouble. He had had the whole household hunting it, saying fretfully, “It’s all very well, but I can get court-martialled for this,” until, at length, the nurserymaid found it at the back of the toy cupboard.
The novel is diffuse and episodic in structure, and somewhat uneven in tone, combining ruthless comic satire in Waugh’s old manner with a more affectionate, even at times sentimental attitude towards his characters. One might cite, as examples of the latter, Alastair’s altruistic enlistment in the ranks, or Peter Pastmaster’s decision to marry and beget an heir before risking his life in the armed struggle. It should be remembered, though, that Waugh himself volunteered for active service with similar idealism, and that his subsequent disillusionment with the political and military conduct of the war had not yet hardened into firm conviction when, in 1941, he wrote Put Out More Flags to divert himself on a long and tedious voyage by troopship. And, in spite of its flaws, this novel has many pleasures to offer. The subplot of Basil Seal’s commercial exploitation of the awful evacuees, for example, the narrative thread of the lunatic bomber at large in the Ministry of Information, and the unerringly wrong prophecies of Sir Joseph Mainwaring are handled with characteristic skill. The fact is that Evelyn Waugh was incapable of writing badly, and often in this novel he writes as brilliantly as ever. But his great work of fiction about the Second World War, the Sword of Honour trilogy, was still to come.
chapter six
LIVES IN LETTERS: KINGSLEY & MARTIN AMIS
THE LETTERS OF Kingsley Amis is a big, thick book: just over 1,200 closely printed pages, including copious and useful footnotes by the meticulous editor, Zachary Leader.1 Faced with such a tome, readers may be tempted to dip into it, rather than read it from cover to cover. That would be a mistake. First, you might deny yourself much pleasure, especially in the form of humour. I have not laughed aloud at a book so frequently for a very long time—possibly not since reading the Letters of Philip Larkin, with which this collection is symbiotically connected. Second, only by reading the Amis letters continuously and in chronological order can you trace the “emotional arc” of the life they reveal.
I quote that phrase from Martin Amis’s book Experience, which was published at the same time; and to get the most out of the father’s letters you must read the son’s book too.2 It describes and meditates on a number of dramatic events in Martin Amis’s life that converged in a period not much longer than a year between 1994 and 1995, namely: the breakup of his marriage to Antonia Phillips, and the beginning of a new relationship with Isabel Fonseca (whom he later married); a long and excruciating course of dental treatment and oral surgery; the revelation that his cousin Lucy Partington, missing since Christmas 1973, was one of the victims of the infamous serial murderer Frederick West; the protracted and much publicised negotiations for a very large advance on his novel The Information, entailing an acrimonious parting from his agent Pat Kavanagh and her husband, Amis’s close friend, Julian Barnes; the appearance in his life of a daughter, Delilah, now nineteen, whom he had never previously met and who had only just been informed of his relation to her; the life-threatening illness of his literary hero and mentor, Saul Bellow; and the last illness and death of his father, Kingsley.
This was an extraordinary concatenation of trials and tribulations, alarms and excursions, reversals and discoveries, which might seem implausible in a novel; and Martin Amis was wise to write it up in an autobiographical rather than a fictional mode, speaking, as he says, “without artifice”—which is not the same thing, of course, as without art. There is a great deal of art in Experience, not only in the style, as one would expect from this writer, but also in the structure. The narrative is notable for elaborate and complex time-shifts back and forth across the author’s life, setting up echoes and parallels between incidents, playing variations on the themes of love and death, fathers and sons, innocence and experience. And it too has footnotes, even longer and more copious than Zachary Leader’s, which provide a further level of remembrance and reflection.
Since Martin Amis, for reasons which may readily be guessed at, provides very little circumstantial detail about his matrimonial problems, the emotional core of Experience is the death of his father, which also provides its narrative climax. On one level, therefore, the book belongs to what has lately become a very popular subgenre—the confessional memoir provoked by the death of a parent or spouse, such as Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last S
ee Your Father? John Bayley’s Iris, and John Walsh’s The Falling Angels. But Martin Amis’s contribution has a special twist, in that his relationship to his father was, from young adulthood onward, always public as well as private, literary as well as familial. Not only were they both novelists; they occupied nearly identical positions as trend-setters in the literary generations to which they respectively belonged, and consequently excited more adulation, imitation, hostility, and media attention than any of their contemporaries. I once described this as “a dynastic succession unprecedented in the annals of English literature,” and Martin Amis is well aware of its uniqueness. So indeed was Kingsley. In 1984, the year when both Money and Stanley and the Women were published, Martin reported that an American friend had said to him, “I bought your book today. I bought your daddy’s book too,” and Kingsley commented delightedly, “That sentence will only get said once in the history of the world.” He was not always so benevolently disposed to his son’s success, however. “Of course Martin Amis is more famous than I am now,” he grumbles to Philip Larkin in a letter that same year. And in 1979: “Martin is spending a year abroad as a TAX EXILE . . . Little shit. 29, he is. Little shit.” There is some irony at his own expense there, but some genuine resentment too.
With the Amises there was, therefore, a doubling of the ordinary Oedipal tension between father and son. Literary rivalry raised the stakes in the unfolding family romance. When Kingsley left his first wife, Hilary, for Elizabeth Jane Howard in 1963, Martin and his elder brother were as hurt as children usually are in such circumstances. In due course they went to live with their father, but Martin’s mild delinquency and resistance to schooling were obviously a form of protest. When, belatedly, he began to take literature seriously, he worked fanatically hard to achieve a first at Oxford, as his father had done, debated reputations and ideas fiercely with him, and developed his own talent under the inspiration of mentors (Nabokov, Bellow) whom his father scorned. In taste and practice, Kingsley was anti-modernist, but Martin is postmodernist.