Mischief, Black

Evelyn Waugh’s world

Decline and Fall, Labels, Vile Bodies, Remote People, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust, Ninety-Two Days, Waugh in Abyssinia, Scoop, Work Suspended, Put Out More Flags, Brideshead Revisited, Scott-King's Modern Europe, When the Going Was Good, The Loved One, Helena, Love Among the Ruins, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh

A raucous entertainment is going on, to which you were not invited. You hear it through the walls. There’s the sound of glass breaking, screams of pain from what you think surely can’t be a member of the human species. And there are cheers, drunken cheers, sick and depraved cheers, from people who never asked you to be part of their crowd. And then, as if to top it off, you open your window to try — in your own way — to understand what is going on, and someone leans forward through the window frame and vomits all over your floor.

Is there a better beginning in English comic letters? Is there a person we know better than the luckless man who has been given that treatment? I doubt it.

But really, everyone praises Decline and Fall. It is peerless. It is perfect. (I once read it late at night on a train filled with violent drunks, and genuinely worried lest my inability to suppress hysterical laughter might alert them to my presence and end my life.) There is not much new to be said about it. Mr Grimes. In the soup again. The dread accusation of white slavery. So instead, I’ll talk a little about other Waugh works which have not got their due, sixty years on from his death. For someone so lauded, Waugh has not got his garlands. People don’t get him. They never did.

First, Black Mischief. Difficult though it may be to accept for some, this is a very funny book. The characters, the setting, the absurdism of 1930s-new meets old. People believe the whole thing is so ridiculous it must be grotesque caricature (and would what be a bad thing?). But read the other descriptions of the coronation that Waugh attended in Abyssinia – his own, in Waugh in Abyssinia, perhaps, or Wilfred Thesiger’s, or even at a pinch The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuściński, who saw the terminal stage of the same regime. Tell me the absurdity is not merited, not just. And see the stock characters Waugh finds around this foreign court. Tell me such men do not occur in the histories.

Basil Seal is a far greater and more memorable comic creation than any other Waugh invented. His appearances even in quite thin stuff – the wartime novel Put Out More Flags and the story ‘Basil Seal Rides Again’ – transform the material. Seal is so duplicitous, so lazy, so obviously underusing his tremendous brain, that when he turns his mind to scheming, the results are delightful and satisfying. One or two words about the short stories. Many people admire ‘Mr Loveday’s Little Outing’ and I am among them. It is fabulous. Permit me to fly the flag a little for ‘Tactical Exercise’. And among the novellas, Love Among the Ruins and Work Suspended. They are worth it. And for late novels. Pinfold and Helena are, of course, not funny. But they are intriguing. And what reader does not want a little intrigue now and then, to leaven the poor diet we are offered by our betters?

Personally, I do not care as much as others do for Brideshead. It has many fine moments, but as Waugh himself acknowledged upon re-reading it for the revised uniform edition, it is gluttonous, vain, self-regarding, pompous. Only for true devotees or people most recently who read it so long ago they forgot what it’s like, brace of pages after brace. Let them have their memories, truncated though they might be.

The Sword of Honour books are, of course, late masterpieces, but they could have been written by someone else. Other writers of Waugh’s own day realised that military life was inefficient and time-wasting. That people who joined up to fight because they were motivated and moral ended up dead or disillusioned. How much the war trilogy of Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time owes to Waugh, we cannot say. But his work on the same themes is better.

And I want, finally, to think a little about travel writing. Waugh said he did it for the money and disdained the genre. He said it was foolishness, that people who took it seriously were, therefore, fools themselves. And some critics, William Boyd among them, see the stories contained within as highly theatrical, nay fictional. Boyd’s view is that Waugh disguised the collapse of his own first marriage, to a woman called Evelyn, in a narrative of another couple that goes on throughout Labels. It’s an interesting idea.

Ninety-Two Days is a stimulating look at the sheer hell, the green hell, of South America, with Waugh sweating and feeling sick and broadly hating every moment of trekking though the kind of place other people save for their whole lives to visit. The scene in which he meets a customs man and discusses the done way to cheat one’s way around getting the necessary vaccinations – it very closely mirrors conversations I have had with businessmen, people who travel the world, especially in the covid era.

Nothing ever changes.

Waugh didn’t like his travel writing, as he admits in When the Going Was Good, a fine anthology of it.

But Labels also gives us moments like this. Waugh and his companion have gone ashore at Port Said while their wives recuperate from illness onboard ship. The novelist and his friend are besieged by beggars and solicitors. They realise, after some time spent cringing and handing out change, that the only way to clear a path is to take their sticks and to strike purposefully, laying all about them. The beggars don’t mind; they are used to it, Waugh tells us. This they do – attacking all comers – eventually with some practice and skill. When their wives join them, a little time later, they see their husbands rushing into a crowd of foreigners, sticks held upright, striking out at every face they see raised in their direction. And they, the wives, in their ignorance, they are appalled.

That’s Waugh. That’s Waugh.