Gibbs claimed “to be comparatively accomplished only in the construction of English sentences,” but he also had a nicely angled point of view and the courage of his opinions. Intellectually, he was hostage to no one, not even Shakespeare. He thought Romeo and Juliet an ill-made play: “There are too many innocent misunderstandings and staggering coincidences, too many potions and poisons; in the end, far too many bodies cluttering up the Capulets’ not so very quiet tomb.” Sacred cows, he felt, made good hamburger. Paul Robeson, he wrote, over-acted in the part of Othello.
To the gods of modernism, he brought no sacrifices, but instead a heavy dose of useful philistinism. Of Waiting for Godot, he wrote: “All I can say in a critical sense, is that I have seldom seen such meagre moonshine stated with such inordinate fuss.” Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit he called “little more than a one-act drama of unusual monotony and often quite remarkable foolishness.”
On lighter matters, writing about Maurice Chevalier’s stagey pursuit of women, he compared French seduction to women’s basketball: “There is a lot of squealing and jumping up and down, but certainly not much in the scoring department.” In explaining the breakup of the old Algonquin Round Table group, he wrote:
Those who did not move away [to Hollywood, to Connecticut or Bucks County] were by now temperamentally unfit for the old close association, since there is nothing more enervating to the artist than the daily society of a lot of people who are just as famous as he is.
One of Gibbs’s few idols was Max Beerbohm, also a literary man of all work, with great skill as a caricaturist added. Gibbs and Beerbohm shared the quality of sublime detachment. No man of his day was less parti pris than Wolcott Gibbs. After reading the more than six hundred pages of his writing in Backward the Sentences, I cannot characterize his politics. A. J. Liebling, his colleague on the New Yorker, claimed that his own politics were “let Paris be gay,” which turned out not to be true in the case of Liebling (who was a fairly standard liberal), but was, I believe, true of Gibbs, though gaiety, clearly, was scarcely his speciality.
In a fine formulation, Mr. Vinciguerra writes that Gibbs “embodied [the New Yorker’s] archetypal combination of blunt honesty, acid wit, exacting standards, and elegant condescension.” The New Yorker of those days seemed mildly aristocratic, making everything seem easily within the grasp of its writers and, perhaps as important, of its readers. Hilton Kramer, in an essay-review of James Thurber’s The Years with Ross, recounts that a New Yorker fact-checker called him countless times to get straight the positions of various French art critics for a piece the magazine’s then art critic, Robert Coates, was writing about the European art scene. When the piece appeared, Kramer was struck “at the absurdity of the feigned ease” with which it was presented in Coates’s published copy.
I marveled at the discrepancy between the pains taken to get the facts of the matter as accurate as possible, and the quite different effort that had gone into making the subject seem easy and almost inconsequential to the reader.
What was going on? “For myself,” Kramer wrote,
I don’t see how we can avoid concluding that the principal reason for the New Yorker’s method is ignorance: the ignorance of writers first of all, and ultimately the ignorance of readers. In a society which could assume a certain level of education and sophistication in its writers and journalists—which could make the assumption because it shared in that education and sophistication—there would be more of a public faith that writers knew more or less what they are talking about.
The magazine has never been without its critics. Robert Warshow, in 1947, wrote:
The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.
The charge here on the part of Hilton Kramer and Robert Warshow, of course, is middlebrowism—the pretense of culture when the efforts behind attaining true culture have been efficiently eliminated for the reader.
The charge of middlebrowism became more difficult to prove as the New Yorker began, under William Shawn, to load up on certified intellectual contributors. Edmund Wilson was the first of these, writing regularly for the magazine’s book section. Dwight Macdonald soon joined Wilson, and his assignment was, precisely, to attack such middlebrow cultural artifacts as Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins’s Great Books of the Western World, the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, and Webster’s Third International Dictionary. Harold Rosenberg signed on as the magazine’s regular art critic; Susan Sontag wrote for the magazine. Vladimir Nabokov, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, and other highbrow novelists regularly published stories in the New Yorker. Two of the great controversial intellectual publishing events—Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and James Baldwin’s essay “The Fire Next Time”—first appeared in the magazine’s pages.
The reason so many intellectuals, in effect, went over to the New Yorker is no more complicated than that they were asked. The money the magazine paid was much greater than that paid by any other even semi-serious magazine. Quite as important, the New Yorker had the best of all American audiences. Anything published in its pages was certain to be read by everyone a writer cared about. Even people who didn’t much like the magazine felt obliged at least to glimpse it. Writing for the magazine, one discovered an America one could not be sure existed until one heard from its readers: the cardiologist from Tacoma, Washington, who kept up his ancient Greek, the lady from Tyler, Texas, who read Proust in French and with intellectual penetration.
A writer’s editor, William Shawn’s regular contributors not merely appreciated but adulated him. Two of my friends who were staff writers under his reign never referred to him as other than Mr. Shawn. Editorially, Shawn was immensely tolerant, allowing writers to take years to complete assignments (he could also hold back pieces for decades and not run them at all). He permitted his writers to run on at great, sometimes stupefying, length: long John McPhee pieces on geology or E. J. Kahn pieces on corn were notable winners in the eye-glazing boredom category. A man who does not press a writer about deadlines, never suggests that length might be a problem, and pays him handsomely—that, from a writer’s point of view, is an immortal editor.
William Shawn was the editor responsible for changing the New Yorker, taking it from the realm of smart into that of intellectual journalism. Was it a happy change? Under it, Wolcott Gibbs was replaced as a drama critic after his death by Kenneth Tynan, a man much more attuned—some would say too well attuned—to the avant-garde. Arlene Croce, along with Edwin Denby, the best dance critic America has known, covered ballet. Movies, which had hitherto been treated as best trivial entertainment, became under Pauline Kael, quite literally, the talk of the town, with Miss Kael’s opinion on the latest movie weighing more heavily among the so-called educated classes than the opinions of the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
The magazine also became more political. Earlier, E. B. White would occasionally print Notes & Comments editorials urging the need for world government, an idea always up there among the top ten dopiest political ideas of all time. Under Shawn, political ideas became more specific. He ran Rachel Carson on pollution, Lewis Mumford on city planning, and several pieces highly critical of the conduct of the American involvement in Vietnam. The magazine’s politics was liberal, but—an important qualification—liberal without being hostage to any political party, professing to speak on behalf of the greater good of the nation.
During his long editorship, William Shawn held to an unvarying policy of no profane words or descriptions of sex in the New Yorker. (Whenever one saw a John Cheever or John Updike story in Harper’s or Esquire, one could be fairly certain that it contained bits of fancy fornication.) Harold Ross’
s advice upon hiring editors for the magazine was “Don’t f--- the contributors,” which Wolcott Gibbs claimed was the closest Ross came to enunciating an editorial policy. This was a policy violated by of all people Shawn himself; after his death it was revealed by Lillian Ross, one of the magazine’s long-time reporters, that she and the married Shawn had had a love affair of many years standing.
Much to the consternation of the New Yorker’s staff, in 1987 William Shawn’s retirement was forced, at the age of 82, by S. I. Newhouse, who had bought the magazine for his Conde Nast publishing empire. Robert Gottlieb, a successful publisher’s editor, replaced Shawn. His major contribution to the magazine was to allow profane language and sexy stories in its pages. He departed five years later, to be replaced by Tina Brown, who set out to make the magazine genuinely with-it. She had a taste for epateing the genteel with gaudy covers and photographs, and also made it seem, through her selection of articles, as if the most important things in the world were Hollywood, designer culture, and royalty.
After Tina Brown left the New Yorker in 1998 to begin a short-lived magazine called Talk, the magazine was taken over by David Remnick, an earnest journalist who had written well on the Soviet Union and other matters. New Yorker staff members, feeing this a return to seriousness, were pleased. Remnick’s ascension also meant a turn toward a more specific politics. The politics were liberalism now distinctly aligned with the Democratic Party; both in a large number of its general articles that make American foreign policy seem what the left calls “the imperialist project,” and in its “Comment” editorials written most weeks by Hendrik Hertzberg, which read with all the complexity of old western movies: good guys wear Democratic hats, villains Republican ones, and that isn’t the Lone Ranger but Barack Obama riding to the rescue.
Relevance has its costs. In its covers, its coverage of events, its need to seem au courant, its insistent politics, the New Yorker has begun to seem more and more like a weekly news or opinion journal (“of salvation”) than the magazine once adored by earlier generations of readers. The New Yorker Wolcott Gibbs’s wrote for, elegant, literary, ironic, laced with a bracing skepticism, was the spiritual house organ for people looking for relief from the clang of rivaling opinions, the barkering of each week’s Next New Thing, the knowingness of haughty punditry, the maelstrom of the world’s unrelenting noise. The New Yorker of the current day flourishes financially, its circulation in the ascendant. The New Yorker of Wolcott Gibbs’s time, published in the world we now live in, would probably not last out the year.
Evelyn Waugh
(2017)
When the final reviews—that is, the obituaries—came in, Evelyn Waugh’s were mixed. His literary accomplishments were noted, so too his Catholic apologetics, but heavy emphasis was put upon his reactionary views and his snobbery. Waugh’s son Auberon, responding to these obituaries, noted that they were wrong about his father’s snobbery (he scarcely cared about pedigree) and his politics (“politics bored him”), and missed the main point about him: “it is simply that he was the funniest man of his generation.”
Quite so, though it needs to be added that in the case of Evelyn Waugh funny was not always the same as amusing. Amusing suggests light, whimsical, charming. P. G. Wodehouse is amusing. Waugh’s humor tended to the dark, and, given his often gratuitous pugnacity, usually had a victim, or at least an edge. When the favorite of his five children, his daughter Margaret, wished to live on her own, he told her “you are no more ready for independence than the Congo.” After Randolph Churchill had what turned out to be a benign tumor removed through surgery, Waugh remarked that it was the only thing about Randolph that was wasn’t malignant and they removed it. When someone called his attention to a typographical error in one of his books, he replied: “Now that they no longer defrock priests one cannot get any decent proofreading.”
Waugh’s humor was also strong in the line of mischief. While serving in the British Army in Yugoslavia during World War II, he spread the rumor that Marshal Tito was a woman, a lesbian into the bargain. Of his teaching at a boys school in Wales he claimed to “take a certain pleasure in making all that I teach as dreary to the boys as it is to myself.” When his friend Ronald Knox asked him if he, Knox, seemed to nod off while giving a lecture, Waugh replied that indeed he did, but only for “twenty minutes.” He described travel to Mexico as “like sitting in a cinema, seeing the travel film of a country one has no intention of visiting.” Of the reception of his novel Brideshead Revisited in America, he wrote: “My book has been a great success in the United States which is upsetting because I thought it in good taste before and now I know it can’t be.”
Waugh soon enough acquired a reputation for social ruthlessness, a ruthlessness nicely abetted by his heavy drinking. “Even his close friends were not spared,” Nancy Mitford wrote, “he criticized everyone fiercely and was a terrible tease, but he set about it in such an amusing way that his teasing was easily forgiven.” Not everywhere, not by everyone. Martha Gellhorn, a friend of Waugh’s friend Diana Cooper, called him “a small and ugly turd.” Duff Cooper, Diana’s husband, reacting to a malicious comment Waugh made about Lord Mountbatten at a dinner party, lashed out: “How dare a common little man like you, who happens to have written one or two mildly amusing novels, criticize that great patriot and gentleman. Leave my house at once.” On his own social combativeness, Waugh has Gilbert Pinfold, his autobiographically-based, eponymous character in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, ask, “Why does everyone except me find it so easy to be nice?”
Philip Eade’s recent biography of Waugh goes a fair way to answering that question. Eade’s book is subtitled, with some precision, A Life Revisited, for it is Evelyn Waugh’s life and only glancingly his work to which he devotes his attention. His biography is a chronicle of Waugh’s recent ancestry and early childhood, his education, two marriages, and career on to his death in 1966 at the age of sixty-three. Waugh’s books and their reception are mentioned in due course, but it is his career and the formation of his character that holds chief interest for Philip Eade.
Rightly so, I should say, for Evelyn Waugh’s novels, travel writings, and biographies (of Edmund Campion and Ronald Knox) do not really require elaborate critical exploration. All Waugh’s writing requires is attentive readers, alive to his elegant prose, sense of his craftsmanship at plotting, and the manifold comical touches that bedizen his pages. “Germans,” a character in Brideshead Revisited remarks, “sometimes seem to discover a sense of decency when they get to a classical country.” In A Handful of DustI, a secondary character, Mrs. Rattery, reveals that she has children, two sons: “I don’t see them often. They’re at school somewhere. I took them to the cinema last summer. They’re getting quite big. One’s going to be good-looking, I think. Their father is.” Rather a different angle on parenting, this, one might say.
Philip Eade recounts Evelyn Waugh’s life in an admirably economic and straightforward manner, with a nice sense of measure and in a prose style free of jargon and cliché. He neither Freudianizes him nor condemns his lapses into social savagery. Without a trace of tendentiousness, free of all doctrine, Eade the biographer seeks to understand the strange behavior of Evelyn Waugh through telling the story of his life without commenting censoriously on it. The task is far from a simple one. Waugh’s friend Freddy Smith, the second Earl of Birkenhead, in a memoir of his war days with him, wrote: “Evelyn, like Max Beerbohm, but probably for different reasons, had decided to drop an iron visor over all his intimate feelings and serious beliefs and by doing so excluded one from any understanding of his true character. . .This deep reticence detracted in a sense from his conversation, which was of the highest order, because however brilliant and witty, one always felt that he was playing some elaborate charade which demanded from him constant vigilance and wariness.”
Early in the pages of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, a novel recounting the nervous breakdown of its hero, Waugh stages an interview
for Pinfold with a journalist from the BBC. (Waugh himself underwent such a breakdown owing to his overdosing on bromide and choral combined with his heavy alcohol intake, a potion he hoped would help him attain sleep.) Of this interview Pinfold notes that the interviewer
seemed to believe that anyone sufficiently eminent to be interviewed by him must have something to hide, must be an impostor whom it was his business to trap and expose, and to direct his questions from some basic, previous knowledge of something discreditable.
When during an actual interview by John Freeman of the BBC, Waugh was asked why he lived in the country, he answered that it was not because of a love of sport or rural life, but “to get away from people like you.”
In The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, from behind the screen of Pinfold, Waugh describes his own menacing social profile with a nice exactitude. Pinfold observes that “his habits of life were self-indulgent and his utterances lacked prudence.” As for his tastes, the strongest of them were negative. “He looked at the world sub species aeternitatis and he found it flat as a map; except when, rather often, personal annoyance intruded.” The part he decided to play “was a combination of eccentric don and testy colonel . . . it came to dominate his whole outward personality” as “he offered the world a front of pomposity mitigated by indiscretion that was as hard, bright and antiquated as a cuirass.”
Soon after he came to consciousness Evelyn Waugh was made aware that he was not his father’s favorite child. His old brother Alec—later a popular, now a largely forgotten novelist—was. A five-year difference in age separated the two brothers, just the right distance to prevent closeness and make intimacy difficult. Evelyn did not so much hate his father as hold him in contempt. His father was a reviewer (of more than 6,000 books), essayist, publisher (with the firm of Chapman & Hall). Evelyn would later say that he “did everything at deleterious speed.” He also early noted his father’s pomposity, which, combined with his gross sentimentality, precluded all possibility for admiration on the part of his younger son. The older he grew the more dismissive, not to say derisive, of his father he became. Waugh found succor as a child with his mother and his nanny. He would always find intimacy easier with women—Diana Cooper, Nancy Mitford, Anne Fleming—than with men.
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