It's strange, but we tend to think of the nineteenth century as somehow more conservative than the twentieth. Mostly because it happened so long ago. But it recently occurred to me that, in reality, the great Victorian British writers were actually more willing to write about the working class than were those who followed them. Writers in the twentieth century, instead, mostly seemed to write about other writers. This article deals with a very conservative twentieth-century author by the name of Evelyn Waugh-a fellow who definitely did not write about the working class (he would have called them the "lower orders"). In particular, it deals with his first book, Decline and Fall, which he published while still a very young man.
Waugh is mostly known today for his book Brideshead Revisited. He would probably not be happy about that. According to Graham Greene, he was later apologetic about the book, as it seemed to him mawkish and overwritten with the passage of time, and, later on in his life, he even went back to the novel and rewrote a few passages which struck him as particularly embarrassing. So it really was "revisited." Waugh was known in his own time, and probably would like to be known still, for his witty comic novels and satires of British society, which were a far cry from the serious and sentimental Brideshead Revisited.
His first novel, Decline and Fall, is a book in this vein. It lampoons a whole swath of British society and is quite funny about it too. It was followed by Vile Bodies, another good-natured jibe at polite society. Then came Black Mischief, which is as racist as it sounds and deals with Ethiopia. Waugh felt the need, wherever he saw attempts being made at progress and development, to poke a bit of fun. The "mischief" referred to in the title was Emperor Haile Selassie's attempt to modernize the nation.
This effort, for one reason or another, outraged Waugh. We'll get to that later. He followed it with A Handful of Dust, Scoop, about journalists in Ethiopia, Put Out More Flags, about the Second World War, and the aforementioned Brideshead Revisited. Then came The Loved One, about, of all things, the Hollywood funeral industry, Helena, an historical novel, Love Among the Ruins, a dystopian satire the target of which is the welfare state, the Sword of Honor trilogy, again about the war, and the Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, about Waugh's own mental health problems late in life.
But forget all that. This article is about Waugh's first book, in which we can already see his philosophy taking shape. Some typical Waugh features: the novel's characters are subjected to frequent and inexplicable reversals of fortune. Horrible things befall them seemingly at random. Yet they still retain a stiff-upper-lip attitude. We can also see his conservatism and his fear of any attempt at progress.
But before we dive into the novel, we need to address certain things about Waugh. First off, was he a closet homosexual? It's possible, but since most of us have some homosexual leanings, I'm not all that interested in finding subtle hints of them in his works. I'm not very good at spotting them anyway. Second, we have to deal with his mental condition. Waugh later suffered a near nervous collapse, the subject of his last book, and, according to his own account, as a young man he attempted suicide by drowning (he was a teacher in Wales for a time, like the protagonist of Decline and Fall). The book's humorous tone doesn't exactly give the impression of suicidal depression, but we have to realize that that hopelessness and despair was a part of Waugh. Finally, his Catholicism. He wrote his first book well before his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church, but his decision to enter that institution was, as he saw it, the culmination of his philosophical development, not a change in it. So we should be able to see, in Decline and Fall, the nascent forces which lead him to the Church.
But now, the novel itself. I have to admit that when I first opened Decline and Fall, I groaned audibly. My greatest fear was that Waugh would be simply another P.G. Wodehouse. Not that there's anything wrong with Wodehouse, as long as he is taken in small doses. He can be very funny. But after awhile, his essentially invented, fantasy realm of rich idlers becomes intolerable. The unremitting frivolousness of Wodehouse's characters, combined with the lack of any real, recognizable human problems in his books, can only be stood for so long. And on page one of Waugh's book, within seconds, we are introduced to Scone College, the rowdy Bollinger Club, and a man named Alistair Digby-Vain-Trumpington. The beer-swilling, fox-hunting snobbery of it all leaves the reader almost immediately exhausted. But not to worry-things begin to look up at once.
