A very English comedy of manners and mannerisms

Evelyn Waugh is now accepted as one of England's literary greats yet, as James Wood argues, he was an author of hidden shallows

THERE is a telling anecdote, perhaps apocryphal but illuminating nevertheless, about Evelyn Waugh. The story dates back to the immediate aftermath of the second world war, when Waugh, already a celebrated and popular literary novelist, sat down to dinner with his young family. To mark the end of hostilities, and the subsequent re- opening of supply lines, each of the local children in the area had been given a banana. Still a remarkably exotic fruit even then, and almost never seen during the war years, the Waugh children eagerly anticipated the promised treat of a banana for dessert. To the family's horror, however, Evelyn himself peeled and ate the fruit with lip-smacking relish. As he shoveled the bananas into his unkind mouth, cream dribbling down his several terraced chins, he eyed the children with a baleful glare as if daring any kind of familial insurrection. It's a tale remarkable for the powerful insight it provides into the personal turmoil of an author, who - despite his place in the canon of 20th-century British literature - was beset by the twin demons of greed and selfishness.

Just as a generation of Austrian novelists felt their lives ended when the Hapsburg empire began to collapse in 1914 Sarajevo, so Waugh, and others like him, felt their age ended in 1939. Waugh, after 1945, after Brideshead Revisited, was very different from the Waugh of the 1920s and 1930s.

Yet it is the later Waugh who is most familiar. Our sense of him has been so darkened by the fiery charade of his postwar life that, to compensate, his admirers tend to make him sound as if he were a great moralist, the Swift of SW1; or the greatest comic stylist of the century (but read a page of Joyce or Beckett or Nabokov and how thin Waugh seems); or a covert modernist who turned the speech of the upper classes into neurotic fragments, as Eliot did with London voices in The Waste Land; or, most absurd, as a humanist in disguise.

Reading the complete stories of Waugh demonstrates, however, cruelly enough, that though perhaps never simply the misanthrope of popular image, Waugh was a more limited writer than modern over- compensation will allow. He was a brilliant, polished, somewhat depthless entertainer, at his best when writing a kind of novelised version of West End drawing-room theatre and at his worst when crooning on behalf of the causes he believed in - the Catholic church, the English aristocracy, old architecture.

Waugh's early comic brilliance, like so much comic writing, has to do with the conversion of speech, and speech patterns, into discursive prose. Speech runs on, observes few boundaries and is full of non sequiturs and strange juxtapositions. Speech, because it is unguarded, is not always rational and is therefore often comic. Waugh, of course, had an exceptionally hospitable ear and he listened to the breaking glass of brittle upper-class English speech and imagined it into being in the early novels: Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust, Scoop.

One of the stories reproduced in a new American compilation of his work, Charles Ryder's Schooldays, fills in for us the pre-Oxford life of the narrator of Brideshead Revisited. The story is quite without the self-indulgence of that novel and clicks along at a satirical pace. It is a rather trivial, almost pointless fragment - yet another evocation of English boarding school life - but it demonstrates Waugh's perfect pitch for speech.

The boys are discussing the elevation of O'Malley, who is hated, to the position of prefect (called the Settle): "Graves had him in at the end of last term and said he was making him head of the dormitory. The head of Upper Dormitory never has been on the Settle before last term when they moved Easton up from Lower Anteroom after we ragged Fletcher. O'Malley told Graves he couldn't take it unless he had an official position."

The boys' names, combined with the strange proper terms, clog the sentence into code - a madman's code. Waugh reveals ordinary speech to be a kind of lunacy. This is what Waugh was best at, and at such moments he does indeed reveal a modernist side - which, like Eliot's voices, was borrowed from Dickens. It recalls a passage of very similar Joycean speech from A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, in which "a fat young man" announces the civil service exam results: "Griffin was plucked. Halpin and O'Flynn are through the home civil. Moonan got fifth place in the Indian. O'Shaughnessy got fourteenth. The Irish fellows in Clarke's gave them a feed last night. They all ate curry".

But more than the reproduction of his characters' speech, Waugh converted speech into his own narrative style. He transferred the mad logic of speech and made it a principle of his comic universe. The typical Waugh sentence runs on in the way speech does, into borderless fields of irrationality: "At dinner Margot talked about matters of daily interest, about some jewels she was having reset, and how they had come back all wrong, and how all the wiring of her London house was being overhauled because of the fear of fire; and how the man she had left in charge of her villa at Cannes had made a fortune at the Casino and given her notice and how the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings was demanding a guarantee that she would not demolish her castle in Ireland; and how her cook seemed to be going off his head that night, the dinner was so dull; and how Bobby Pastmaster was trying to borrow money from her again ".

THE comedy arises from the clipped specificity. In reality, our speech is generally vague and filmy, often maddeningly undetailed. Waugh retains only the movement, the speed of speech. For the purposes of comedy, he makes his details abruptly local. This is comic because his sentences then have the form of vagueness - they speed onward borderlessly - but the content of extreme precision. It allows Waugh to slip past us the most outrageous exaggerations, since the propulsion of the sentences is such that the exaggerations are treated as if they were ordinary details. By understating the comedy, this ultimately intensifies it.

Waugh perfected this technique in the early novels and in his letters, where the most bizarre details and connections are offered as if they were mere banalities, hardly worth mentioning: "Miss Jungman has another baby. She has become very proletarian". Or: "B Bennett has had all his teeth knocked out by his daughter Vivian". Or: "I have taken up with a highbrow gentleman who has rubber soles on his boots". (It is this calm understatement that makes so funny Waugh's celebrated description of Norman Mailer as "an American pornographer", as if it were simple fact.) The Letters is probably Waugh's funniest and most cunning - most literary - book. It is there his paradoxical comic art of what might be called airy precision finds its most strategic form. His short stories, or most of them, are bald by comparison. Too many seem like vacations from the true business of literary composition. Several are feeble, feeble because they so willingly collude in their own limitations. An Englishman's Home, for instance, tells the tale of a stranger who arrives in a typical English village, buys a vacant field and announces he is planning to build a scientific laboratory on it. The appalled villagers, roused to action, buy the field back from the stranger, who makes a profit and moves on to the next village. The story's close reveals the stranger is not, of course, a scientist or a builder, but an ordinary crook, a sort of Chichikov of the shires. Waugh colours in the stripes of the local types as expertly as one would expect, but this little chip off Gogol's block only reveals, by comparison, how weak Waugh's tale is. It barely rises above the kind of serviceable, middlebrow entertainment of which a hundred English writers would have been capable.

Waugh's severest limitation is that he trades in typologies, not individuals, and one soon wearies of types. At the heart of Waugh is a strange lack of curiosity. He is content merely to click the hard wooden draughts of his types across his metropolitan boards; it is a game.

This is surely why one generally begins Waugh's comic novels with relish and ends them in boredom. The novels somehow run out of irrigation and substitute crisply farcical proceedings for a current of human stories. One of the tales in this book, Love in the Slump, shows Waugh at his most typologising. The story narrates a comic incident in the honeymoon of two dull, perfectly ordinary upper- class people. Here is how Waugh introduces the woman, Angela Trench- Troubridge: "Angela was 25, pretty, good-natured, lively, intelligent and popular - just the sort of girl, in fact, who, for some mysterious cause deep-rooted in Anglo-Saxon psychology, finds it most difficult to get satisfactorily married. During the last seven years she had done everything which it is customary for girls of her sort to do. In London she had danced on an average four evenings a week, for the first three years at private houses, for the last four at restaurants and night clubs; in the country she had been slightly patronising to the neighbours She had worked in a slum and a hat shop, had published a novel, been bridesmaid 11 times and godmother once; been in love, unsuitably, twice; had canvassed for the Conservative candidates at two general elections, and, like every girl in the British Isles, was unhappy at home."

Of course, the writing is briskly exaggerated, and Waugh is knowing about this portrait of exaggerated normality. But it is not very hard to write like this. Isn't there a path from this kind of writing to Tom Wolfe's tumuli of typology, his bulging caricatures? It is hard to be very interested in such a paragon of conformity, unless the writer proceeds to show us something a little wayward, a little individual, stirs under her society armour. That is precisely what the great, delicate English novelist Henry Green, a friend of Waugh's, would do in this circumstance, and Angela Trench- Troubridge, in Green's hands, would live. But this is not Waugh's way. He simply stretches the essence he has already established and offers a farcical episode in the life of a society type.

Reading Waugh puts one in mind of Virginia Woolf's remark that Middlemarch is one of the few English novels worthy of an adult's attention. Waugh always glitters, but he is not quite worthy of adult attention. Like so many 20th century British novelists - Angus Wilson, Muriel Spark, Martin Amis, even Salman Rushdie - he took from Dickens certain elements - a brilliance at caricature and vibrating grotesques, an attention to speech, a penchant for outlandish names - but he lacked Dickens' transfiguring power, which is the power of metaphor. And he lacked Dickens' humane reach.

Nevertheless, there is one strange story in this book which does not resemble anything else in it. The story is called Compassion and it concerns a Scottish soldier, Major Gordon, who finds himself in Croatia at the end of the second world war. His job is to help the anti-fascist partisans, and that job, as he sees it, is only complicated by the presence of 108 needy Jews. The Jews come to Major Gordon and implore him to arrange their escape to Italy. He seems at first unmoved, but his conscience is gradually goaded: "He had seen something entirely new, which needed new eyes to see clearly: humanity in the depths, misery of quite another order from anything he had guessed before". Major Gordon eventually arranges the safe passage, against great odds, of all but two of the Jews. The story is too didactic and reveals that sermonising rostrum which Waugh mounted whenever he was trying to be "affirmative": "By such strange entrances does compassion sometimes slip, disguised, into the human heart".

It is not really inquiring enough to be a great story; it is a brisk parable. But it is firm, unsentimental and absolutely adult, and a brisk parable is probably better than a brisk farce.

James Wood is the author of The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. The American edition of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh is available on www.amazon.com. Waugh's Sword of Honour Trilogy, edited by Angus Calder, is published by Penguin, priced #12.99

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