Reliable Essays

by Clive James

  In real life Waugh’s fight to hold back the present had the same chance as Canute’s to hold back the sea. In his books his lone last stand seems more inspired than absurd. The progressive voices are mainly forgotten. Waugh, the arch reactionary, still sounds contemporary. As an artist he was not moulded by his times and hence neither failed to see them clearly nor vanished with them when they were over. As an ordinary man he was no doubt impossibly rude but there were a lot of intelligent people who forgave him for it, as this book proves.

  Mark Amory has edited these letters with a fine touch, occasionally calling in an independent witness when Waugh’s delightful capacity for wild exaggeration threatens to distort the historical record. It is hard on the late S. J. Simon that the books he wrote in collaboration with Caryl Brahms, which Waugh enjoyed, should be ascribed only to Caryl Brahms, but apart from that I can’t see many important slips, although John Kenneth Galbraith, giving this book an appropriately laudatory review in the Washington Post, has pointed out that Father Feeny was an unfrocked priest, not ‘the Chaplain at Harvard’. What counts is Mr Amory’s sensitivity to the nuances of the English class system. For finding his way around in that self-renewing maze he has the same kind of antennae as Waugh had, with the difference that they are attached to a cooler head. The result is an unobtrusively knowledgeable job of editing.

  High-handedly rebuking his wife for writing dull letters, Waugh told her that a good correspondence should be like a conversation. He most easily met his own standard when writing to Nancy Mitford but really there was nobody he short-changed. Even the shortest note to the most obscure correspondent is vibrant with both his irascible temperament and his penetrating stare. Above all he was funny – the first thing to say about him. Writing to his wife in May 1942, he described what happened when a company of commandos set out to blow up a tree stump on the estate of Lord Glasgow. The account can be found on page 161 of this book. Anyone who has never read Evelyn Waugh could begin with that page and become immediately enthralled.

  But by this time there is no argument about his stature. While academic studies have gone on being preoccupied with the relative and absolute merits of Joyce and Lawrence, Waugh’s characters have inexorably established themselves among the enduring fictions to which his countrymen traditionally refer as if they were living beings. In this respect Waugh is in a direct line with Shakespeare and Dickens. Since he was public property from the beginning, a critical consensus, when it arrives, can only endorse popular opinion. The consensus has been delayed because many critics were rightly proud of the Welfare State and regarded Waugh’s hatred of it as mean-minded. He was paid out for his rancour by his own unhappiness. For the happiness he can still give us it is difficult to know how to reward him, beyond saying that he has helped make tolerable the modern age he so abominated.

  New York Review of Books, 1980: previously included in

  From the Land of Shadows, 1982

  Postscript

  Merely to enjoy the novels of Evelyn Waugh, let alone to praise him as a great writer, it helps to have been born and raised in Australia. As a student at Sydney University in the late fifties I employed his early novels as one of my most effective displacement activities to console me for my neurotic neglect of the set books. I read Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies over and over, as if they were poems. The class-conscious background of the books was no mystery to me, or to any other Australian of my generation: most of us had been brought up on Tip-Top, Wizard, Rover or their girlish equivalents. We knew what a public school was, even though we had never been to one, except in the sense that our public schools really were public. The only misapprehension I laboured under was that Waugh, because he satirized the English social structure to such effect, must have stood outside it. Later on, in England, I read everything else he had written, plus a lot that had been written about him, and realized that he had stood right in it. He turned out to have been more snobbish than any snob in his books, but it was no skin off my nose. It was clear to me that Brideshead, like King’s Thursday before it, was a house built in the imagination. In real life he might have dreamed of being the master of Castle Howard, but in his creative life he had better ambitions.

  For a visitor like myself it was easy to separate the petty, spiteful and intermittently demented would-be gentleman from the majestically generous artist who had given us his fantastic England. But for the reader born and raised in the actual England this necessary distinction was not so easy to make. Orwell could do it, despite the deep repugnance he felt for everything Waugh stood for both socially and politically. But Orwell had been a long time dead and his indigenous successors in the critical tradition showed few signs of having grasped his point. Forced to explain Orwell’s enthusiasm for Waugh, they might well have said that it was no surprise, because both men had the same background. Even today, and to an alarming degree, background remains a factor in any Englishman’s perception of the arts, because it is such a factor in his perception of society – to the extent that even the most aesthetically sensitive critic finds it hard to purge himself of the supposition that the arts serve social ends.

  Cleverness is no safeguard against this peculiar obtuseness, of which F. R. Leavis, still volcanically active during my time at Cambridge, was merely the most flagrant example. There is no cleverer critic working in Britain today than Professor Carey. (The consideration that I might think this because he gave me the best review I ever got can perhaps be offset by the fact that he also gave me the worst.) Professor Carey is an adventurous reader who makes his judgements according to his enjoyment. He enjoyed Decline and Fall enough to hail it as a comic triumph, but judging from the general trend of his social commentary he would have liked the book even better if it had come out of nowhere. He avowedly loathes the whole ambience of the landed gentry and reserves a special hatred for the arty social climbers who danced attendance. To find, decades after the whole gal`ere paddled itself out of sight, a sophisticated intelligence wasting its fine anger in this way would be comic if it were not so unsettling. What is it with the Poms? one asks one’s shaving mirror helplessly. Evelyn Waugh was a snorting prig. He was also a great writer. Perhaps the ability to hold two such contrary facts in the mind without their clouding each other and the mind as well is the bonus for having been born elsewhere and having arrived in England just in time to see its social coherence fall apart – which no doubt it deserved to do, but to deny the fruitfulness of its last gasp looks like perversity. Although here again, where did the perversity come from, except as a lingering, recriminatory and very understandable reaction to the old iniquities?

  After forty years in residence, I think I know something of the country’s social tensions, but it’s still a relief to be able to say that it’s not my fight. We who are exempt from the local vendettas should be slow, however, to erect a relative advantage into an absolute virtue. It’s always possible that we have missed the nub of the matter, and that an artist like Waugh committed, as a man, sins we have no right to gloss over. There are bright, well-read people in Argentina who will tell you that the capacity of Borges to say so little about life under the military dictatorship irredeemably weakens everything he had to say about life in general. There are veterans of the old Czechoslovakia who can’t hear the name of Milan Kundera without remarking bitterly on the unbearable lightness of his not being there when it counted. I still think it a privilege of the Weltbürger, the man without a country, to be genuinely above such battles. But he should make it his business to know what the battle is about, because some of the people he meets might have been wounded in it, even if they look well.

  2001

  CHARLES JOHNSTON’S CATACOMB GRAFFITI

  Poems and Journeys by Charles Johnston, Bodley Head

  Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin, translated by Charles Johnston, Penguin

  Appearing unannounced in 1977, Charles Johnston’s verse rendering of Eugene Onegin established itself immediately as the best English translation
of Pushkin’s great poem there had yet been. It was an impressive performance even to those who could not read the original. To those who could, it was simply astonishing, not least from the technical angle: Johnston had cast his Onegin in the Onegin stanza, a form almost impossibly difficult in English, and had got away with it. Only an accomplished poet could think of trying such a feat. Yet as a poet Charles Johnston was scarcely known. Indeed, his profile was not all that high even as Sir Charles Johnston, career diplomat and quondam High Commissioner for Australia. All the signs pointed to gentlemanly dilettantism – all, that is, except the plain fact that anyone who can convey even a fraction of Pushkin’s inventive vitality must have a profoundly schooled talent on his own account.

  Now a small volume of Johnston’s own creations, called Poems and Journeys, has quietly materialized, in the unheralded manner which is obviously characteristic of its author. It seems that most of the poems it contains previously appeared in one or other of two even smaller volumes, Towards Mozambique (1947) and Estuary in Scotland (1974), the second of which was printed privately and the first of which, though published by the Cresset Press, certainly created no lasting impression in the literary world. The poems were written at various times between the late 1930s and now. There are not very many of them. Nor does the Bodley Head seem to be acting in any more forthcoming capacity than that of jobbing printer. ‘Published for Charles Johnston by the Bodley Head’ sounds only one degree less bashful than issuing a pamphlet under your own imprint.

  But this time Johnston will not find it so easy to be ignored. Poems and Journeys is unmistakably an important book. Leafing through it, you are struck by its assured displays of formal discipline, but really, from the translator of Onegin, that is not so surprising. Hard on the heels of this first impression, however, comes the further realization that through the austerely demanding formal attributes of Johnston’s verse a rich interior life is being expressed. Johnston’s literary personality is not just old-fashioned: it is determinedly old-fashioned. He has set up the standards of the clubbable English gentry as a bulwark against encroaching chaos. Even those of us whose sympathies are all in the other direction will find it hard not to be swayed by his laconic evocation of the secret garden. It doesn’t do, we are led to assume, to go on about one’s predicament. Yet somehow a stiff upper lip makes eloquence all the more arresting.

  Johnston’s diplomatic duties took him to Japan before the war. After Pearl Harbor he was interned for eight months. After being released in an exchange of diplomatic agents, he was sent to the Middle East. After the war there were various other appointments before he took up his post in Australia. Clearly the accent has always been on uncomplaining service. Nor do the poems in any way question the idea of dutiful sacrifice: on the contrary, they underline it. Trying to identify that strangely identifiable voice, you finally recognize it as the voice of someone who has not talked before, but who has been so amply described that you think you know him. Johnston is the sort of man who has been written about under so many names that when he writes something himself he sounds like a legend come to life. He is the faithful servant of Empire, who now emerges, unexpected but entirely familiar, as its last poet.

  By an act of imagination, without dramatizing himself, Johnston has made poetry out of his own background. The same background has produced poetry before but most of it has been bad, mainly because of an ineluctable cosiness. Johnston, however, is blessed with a distancing wit. He has the intensity of gift which makes facts emblematic without having to change them. It is the classical vision, which he seems to have possessed from the start, as the first two lines of an early poem about Japan clearly show:

  Over the rockbed, over the waterfall,

  Tense as a brushstroke tumbles the cataract.

  The visual element is so striking it is bound to seem preponderant, but there is more at work here than just an unusual capacity to see. To choose a Greek classical measure, alcaics, is an inspired response to the inherent discipline of a Japanese landscape subject: the native poets and painters have already tamed their panorama to the point that their decorum has become part of it, so to match their formality with an equivalent procedure from the poet’s own cultural stock is an imaginative coup. Then there is the subtle control of sonic effects, with the word ‘tense’ creating stillness and the word ‘tumbles’ releasing it into motion. He sees something; he finds the appropriate form; and then he exploits technical opportunities to elaborate his perception. The classic artist identifies himself.

  But everything he was saying was said from under a plumed hat. The Lake Chuzéji of his early poems was the playground of the foreign diplomats. They raced their boats on it, giving way to each other in such elaborate order of precedence that only a Chef de Protocole knew how to steer a perfect race. They committed genteel adultery around its edges. A man of Johnston’s mentality, no matter how well he fitted in by breeding, must sometimes have doubted the validity of his role. He was, after all, a double agent, both loyal functionary and universal observer. But he had not yet conceived of his complicated position as his one true subject – hence a tendency, in these early efforts, towards a Georgian crepuscularity, which even affects his otherwise scrupulously alert diction. Locutions like ‘when day is gone’ crop up with their tone unqualified: something which would not happen again once his manner was fully developed.

  Internment helped develop it. The work commemorating this experience is called ‘Towards Mozambique’ and is one of the three original long poems in the book. Datelined ‘Tokyo 1942–London 1946’, it should now be seen, I think, as one of the outstanding poems of the war, even though it is less concerned with fighting than with just sitting around waiting. Exiles traditionally eat bitter bread, but the narrator is more concerned to reflect than to rail against fate. The poem has something of Ovid’s sadness in the Epistulae ex ponto, except that Johnston is not being sorry just for himself. He is bent on understanding misunderstanding – the tragedy of incomprehension which has brought Japan to war against the West.

  The personal element of the tragedy comes not just from the feeling of his own life being wasted (and anyway, much of the poem seems to have been written after the internment was over) but from regret for the years that were wasted before, when diplomacy was being pursued to no effect. He reflects on what led up to this. A lot did, so he chooses a form which leaves room to lay out an argument – the Spenserian stanza whose clinching alexandrine both Byron and Shelley, in their different ways, found so seductive:

  Wakening, I watched a bundle tightly packed

  That scaled with clockwork jerks a nearby staff.

  Hoist to the top, I saw it twitched and racked

  And shrugged and swigged, until the twists of chaff

  That held it to the halyard broke, and half

  Released the packet, then a sharper tease

  Tore something loose, and with its smacking laugh

  The Jack was thrashing furiously down breeze,

  Mocking the feeble stops that lately cramped its ease.

  Ripping, what? (The ambiguity in the third line, incidentally, is less a grammatical error than a mark of class. Osbert Lancaster and Anthony Powell have both always let their participles dangle with abandon, and Evelyn Waugh, in the same chapter of his autobiography which tells us that only those who have studied Latin can write English, perpetrates at least one sentence whose past participle is so firmly attached to the wrong subject that there is no prising it loose. This habit has something to do, I suspect, with a confusion between the English past participle and the Latin ablative absolute.) But some of the young diplomats were not content to shelter behind Britannia’s skirts. Greatly daring, they took what opportunities they could to mingle with the locals – to penetrate, as it were, the membranes of inscrutable reserve:

  Climbing with shoeless feet the polished stairs,

  Gay were the evenings in that house I’d known.

  The mats are swept, the cushions that are chair
s

  Surround the table like a lacquer throne.

  The geisha have been booked by telephone,

  The whisky brought, the raw fish on the ice,

  The green tea boiled, the saké in its stone

  Warmed to a turn, and seaweed, root and spice

  Await their last repose, the tub of nutcrisp rice.

  The scene is set, and soon a wall will slide,

  And in will run, professional as hell,

  Our geisha team, brisk as a soccer side,

  We’ll ask the ones we like, if all goes well,

  To luncheon at a suitable hotel . . .

  Everything in the diplomatic colony is ordered, decorous and unreal. The unreality becomes most apparent during periods of leave in Shanghai, where a phoney aristocrat rules society:

  ‘Le tennis, ce jeu tellement middle-class,’

  Drawls the duchesse, whose European start,

  Whose Deauville background manages to pass

  For all that’s feudal in this distant part.

  The locals thought she couldn’t be more smart,

  And prized admission to her little fêtes,

  And searched through Gotha with a beating heart,

  But vainly, for the names of her estates,

  And for the strange device emblazoned on her plates.

  But only in the enforced idleness of internment is there time to see all this in perspective. Long months of contemplation yield no grand might-have-beens or if-onlys. Nor, on the other hand, do they bring nihilistic resignation. Britain’s imperial role is not repudiated. Neither is its inevitable passing particularly regretted. Instead, there is redemption in the moment: