All posts tagged Cyril Connolly
Evelyn Waugh: A Biography by Selina Hastings (1994)
He even became quite fond of several of his pupils, and described to like-minded friends the pleasure he took in caning them.
(Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, page 139)
Evelyn Waugh 28 October 1903 to 10 April 1966 (aged 62)
This is a long book, 724 pages, 627 of actual text i.e. without notes and index, but a hugely enjoyable read. I began to write my review as a chronological account but, as with my reviews of lives of Ian Fleming and Somerset Maugham, it just got too long. Too much happened to these fascinating authors. Instead I'm going to do it by themes.
Selina Hastings
It helps that Hastings is herself part of the posh world she describes, being the titled daughter of an earl – Lady Selina Shirley Hastings, eldest daughter of Francis, 16th Earl of Huntingdon – herself educated at private school and Oxford. (Indeed, according to her Wikipedia entry, 'She and her sister, Lady Harriet Shackleton, are in remainder to several ancient English baronies, including those of Hastings and Botreaux.') Hence the ease and confidence with which she writes about Waugh's world, and the aristocratic characters and notable dynasties in it. She writes about this or that eminent personage of Waugh's generation as if they're old friends.
'That'
After a while I noted a stylistic tic Hastings has which is to say of this or that person of the time (the 1930s, 40s and 50s) that they are 'that noted figure', 'those notorious sisters', and so on. She is signalling that she is inside this world, she is part of this world, that for her, with her privileged upbringing confidently swimming in the world of the English aristocracy, these figures from the literary world or aristocratic world are so well known that she assumes everyone knows about them.
…that most influential reviewers, Arnold Bennett (p.180)
Peter Rodd's father was that exquisite flower of diplomacy, one-time ambassador in Rome, Sir Rennell Rodd. (p.260)
Evelyn, together with Duff and Diana and Chips Channon, stayed at the Palazzo Brandolini as guests of that indefatigable social climber, Laura Corrigan… (p.265)
Gabriel Herbert was 22, a handsome, amusing, athletic girl, daughter of that dashing adventurer, Aubrey Herbert 285
the fourth Earl of Carnarvon had purchased a large expanse of that beautiful peninsula 287
This biography puts forward no great theories or revelations, but invites you to immerse yourself at great length (the Minerva paperback edition is 724 pages long) in Waugh's world. It is a big, juicy Christmas cake of a book and a hugely enjoyable read. I like biographies which give you the confident feeling, no matter how spurious, that human beings and the society they move in can be understood.
Father, Arthur Waugh
Evelyn's father, Arthur, was a author, literary critic, and publisher. Arthur attended Sherborne public school and New College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry for a ballad on the subject of Gordon of Khartoum in 1888. Arthur wrote a biography of Tennyson and achieved notoriety by having an essay included in the notorious Yellow Book magazine. From 1902 to 1930 he was Managing Director and Chairman of the publishing house Chapman and Hall, the publishers who were to publish most of his son's novels. In 1893 Arthur married Catherine Raban and their first son Alexander Raban Waugh (always known as Alec) was born on 8 July 1898. Our hero, Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, was born five years later on 28 October 1903.
Bad relations with father
Evelyn's relationship with his father was difficult and strained for at least 4 reasons:
1. Arthur idolised his first son, Alec, who went on to fulfil every paternal dream, becoming head boy at his school, playing for the First XI and First XV, writing poetry and generally being an all-round star pupil. For his boyhood and adolescence Evelyn was always in the shadow of his brother, a situation he exaggerated and dramatised in the short story 'Winner Takes All'.
2. Arthur didn't hide that he wished his second child had been a daughter.
3. As a young man Arthur delighted his friends with reading from literature in which he did all the voices. As a father of small children this was entertaining, but as he got older his manner hardened into a perpetual playing, mimicking, quoting and play-acting. After dinner the whole family would be taken to the 'book room' and subjected to readings from Pinero or singalongs from Gilbert and Sullivan. This began to grate on Evelyn's nerves when he was a boy and by his later teenage years he had developed a real antipathy to his father (p.449). He hated the way it was impossible to break through Arthur's pose of bonhomie to have any genuine communication. When he was irritated with him, Waugh referred to his father as 'Chapman and Hall', the publishing firm he was managing director of.
4. Easygoing, joking, Gilbert and Sullivan Arthur found his son's character unnecessarily hard, haughty, vindictive and cynical. Once he became successful and well known Evelyn In the manner of the Bright Young Things he often said the kind of wounding and hurtful things which his hardened peers accepted and enjoyed, but which made Arthur very uncomfortable.
Home in North London
Initially the family lived in Hillfield Road, West Hampstead but in 1907 moved to a house Arthur designed and had built and named Underhill in the London suburb of Golders Green, which still abutted farms and fields. From 1910 to 1916 Waugh attended Heath Mount preparatory school. Although physically on the short side, Waugh didn't lack confidence in his intellectual powers. He was a bully, he physically bullied smaller boys, including the famous photographer Cecil Beaton who never forgot or forgave him.
Family holidays were spent with the Waugh aunts at Midsomer Norton in Somerset. Here Waugh became deeply interested in high Anglican church rituals and served as an altar boy at the local Anglican church.
Waugh's diary
But the key fact about him is that he wrote: he kept a detailed diary (which has survived), he wrote stories and poems which were published in the school magazine, which he edited, he wrote all the time, perfecting a style of clipped, witty gossip.
Alec had been sent to the same public school as his father, Sherborne, but in 1915 he was discovered in a homosexual relationship and expelled. All would have been hushed up if Alec hadn't gone on – after joining the army and in intervals of officer training – to write a novel, The Loom of Youth, openly describing the gay affair at a school which was recognisably Sherborne. The result was that Waugh , much to his irritation, couldn't go to Sherborne and instead was sent to Lancing public school on the South Downs (just the kind of aggrieved second bestness which he dramatised in 'Winner Takes All').
These days a year at Lancing College costs £37,000 plus all the extras (uniform and kit) x 6 years = easily £225,000.
Hastings is very good at conveying the atmosphere of Lancing which was founded in 1848 by Nathaniel Woodard, a member of the Oxford Movement in the Anglican church which aimed to reintroduce the pageantry and beauty and mystery which had been lost at the Reformation. The school is noted for the enormous chapel which dominates all the other buildings and, being built on a hill, the entire locality. The foundation stone was laid in 1868 but wasn't completed and dedicated (to St Mary and St Nicholas) until 1911, shortly before Waugh arrived.
What comes over from Hastings' evocative account is:
the extreme religiosity of the school, with compulsory attendance at daily prayers plus the full roster of Anglican feasts
the fantastic complexity of the rules and regulations which governed every aspect of dress and behaviour, with different rules for each year group and even for each of the four houses within the years – reading Hastings you begin to understand why order and ritual in every aspect of their lives, continued to structure the perceptions and ideas of this generation for the rest of their lives
the boys were treated as 'men', and much was expected of them in terms of duty and responsibility
the variety and eccentricity of many of the masters
the overwhelmingly arts and humanities nature of the syllabus
the surprising amount of homosexuality: it's hard to understand why Alec was expelled from Sherborne when Hastings describes in detail, with quotes form letters and diaries, intense love affairs which Waugh had with a number of his fellow pupils: pretty younger boys were liable to be courted and wooed by rivalrous older boys, which resulted in all kinds of emotional tangles
Maybe what comes over most, though, is that although Waugh write continuously, pouring out stories and poems which populated the school magazine and continuing his astonishingly precocious diary, his first love was art and design. He was extremely interested in calligraphy and scribing. He was encouraged by masters of an artistic bent and spent some time visiting an eccentric aesthete who lived near the school and owned a full range of pens and knives and inks and precious papers. Waugh developed a real skill for art and design, designing the covers for books and magazines. He was thrilled when one of the masters took receipt of an old-style luxury printing press and was allowed to use it.
All of this is described in detail in the abandoned fragment 'Charles Ryders' Schooldays' which appears to be a straight from life description of a few days from Waugh's last year at Lancing.
Hertford College, Oxford
The drinking and writing continued on to Oxford. Waugh attended Hertford college. What surprised me is the extent of the homosexual activity. There are lots of descriptions of parties where the men danced with each other or snogged in corners or on sofas, descriptions of Evelyn rolling on sofas tickling the tonsils of another undergraduate. He had intense, long affairs with Richard Pares and Alastair Graham.
Graham was a small, beautiful young man who matched Evelyn in drinking but with pronounced aesthetic tastes. Graham sent him love letters with photographs of himself naked. It is from the period of this affair that Evelyn based his image of perfect, heady Romantic Oxford, and the portrait of Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead is based on Alastair Graham.
Waugh did next to no work, no one ever saw him with a book open or reading and repeatedly came close to being expelled. He had won a £100 annual scholarship to study History, a subject in which, it turned out, he had absolutely no interest, to the immense frustration of the senior history don C.R.M.F. Cruttwell. The pair quickly came to dislike each other, Cruttwell's lofty criticism of his attitude driving Waugh to real hatred. Hastings amusingly shows that Waugh got his revenge by naming a whole series of negative characters Cruttwell, for example the murderous lunatic in Mr Loveday's Little Outing was originally named Cruttwell.
Instead of reading and studying, Waugh drank heavily all the time (see his recommendation to Tom Driberg to be drunk p.91 and his advice to be drunk all the time p.97).
Hastings describes the immense influence on his peers of the aesthete Harold Acton, part of the set of rich young aesthetes known as the Georgeoisie, also featuring Brian Howard, founder member of the Hypocrites Club. Acton dedicated his 1927 book of poems, Five Saints, to Waugh and Waugh dedicated his first, breakthrough novel, Decline and Fall, to Acton. As the years went by Acton was to surprise everyone who knew and adulated him at Oxford by never really making his mark in the world of letters, whereas Waugh surprised everyone who'd known him as a hopeless drunk at Oxford by turning out to be one of the most notable writers of the mid-century.
In the summer of 1924 Waugh took his final exams and got a solid Third after which his tutor cancelled his scholarship for the ninth and final term which he required to qualify for a degree. He left in high dudgeon with no prospects of a career.
Hastings brings out the way this post-war generation revelled in consciously infantile behaviour and language. They gave nicknames to each other and wrote and talking in a deliberately juvenile manner. Waugh loved nicknames, which pack his letters and diaries and fictional characters. As examples, he nickamed:
his father 'Chapman and Hall', after the firm he worked for
his brother 'Baldhead' or 'Baldie'
among the Lygon set Waugh nicknamed himself 'Boaz' or 'Bo', Maimie Lygon became 'Blondy', Dorothy Lygon 'Pollen' or 'Poll', Maimie's Pekinese dog was 'P.H.' (standing for Pretty Hound)
in his letters to Diana Cooper he was known as 'Mr Wu'
his future wife's mother, Mary Herbert, was known as 'Mrs What What' as this is what she said all the time
once remarried, Waugh's pet name for his second wife, Laura, was 'Whisker'
the house he bought at Stinchcombe was nicknamed 'Stinkers'
it ran in the family: in letters to Alec's wife Joan, Arthur Waugh refers to his wife, Kate, as 'Mrs Wugs' (p.412)
Waugh left Oxford in the summer of 1924 with no plans and no career and no training. Exactly like the hero of his breakthrough novel, Decline and Fall, he looked for work as teacher in the kind of private school he attended and an agency found him a post at 'Arnold House', a preparatory school at Llandullas on the 'bleak, beautiful Denbighshire coast' where he commenced duties in January 1925 (p.127).
Thus commenced four years of drift and unhappiness. He was alright at the teaching although useless at games which never interested him. He savoured the quirkiness and eccentricities of the other masters, all fodder stored away for his first novel, but he was miles away from his partying friends in Oxford and London.
What made things worse was that when, during the holiday, he returned to London he had gotten embroiled in a love affair with the sexy, promiscuous, hard drinking but aloof Olivia Plunkett-Greene who slept with everyone but him, making him fall deeper and more bitterly in love with her. She was the basis for the fabulously fearless Agatha Runcible in Vile Bodies.
'Olivia as usual behave like a whore and was embraced on a bed by various people.' (Waugh's diary quoted p.141)
He took with him to Wales the manuscript of a novel titled The Temple at Thatch, but when he sent a copy to his friend the influential aesthete Harold Acton, Acton's comments were so critical and dismissive that Waugh burned the only manuscript in the school furnace (p.135).
What really comes over from Hastings' account of this period is the intensity of Waugh's drinking. He got very drunk every night, and often started during the day. Some friends were scared by the intensity of his intake and his diary records thoughts of suicide. His autobiography records a particularly vivid suicide attempt, where he went down to the Welsh coast, stripped off and waded out to sea intending to drown himself (p.136).
All this was expressed in the relationship with Olivia, who herself drank till she passed out (by 1936 she had become an alcoholic and retired from society to live with her mother).
Waugh quit the post at Arnold House in order to be closer to London and took a job at a school in Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire. His diary records that his status among the boys was transformed when he bought a motorbike (p.143) but he had only been here a few weeks when he sacked for allegedly making a drunken pass at the school matron (p.149).
He then secured a teaching post at a school in Notting Hill at £5 a week. Between all these short jobs he came home to stay with his parents at Underhill, the family home in Golders Green, under the increasingly disapproving glare of his father.
He still regarded himself as first and foremost a draughtsman, and enrolled in London courses in printing, cabinet-making and carpentry. Throughout his life Waugh applied metaphors and similes from carpentering and cabinet making to constructing well crafted novels.
His writing career didn't exactly blossom. Having destroyed his draft novel, he managed to get a highly experimental short story, 'The Balance', published in a 1926 anthology published by his father's publishing house, Chapman and Hall (p.145). He researched and wrote an extended essay on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which was printed privately by his lover, Alastair Graham. And it was on the basis of this that an Oxford acquaintance, Anthony Powell (Eton and Oxford) now working for the publishers Duckworths, commissioned a full-length biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which Waugh wrote during 1927 (pp.158 to 160).
It's worth pausing at this point to reflect on how he got started as a writer. Obviously he had to be able to write and to have written things worth reading, but he had huge advantages: his father was managing director of the publishing house which published his first short story; his brother was an established novelist ready with tips and advice; his lover privately published his first extended work; and a friend from Oxford commissioned him to write his first published book.
That is how it works; the network of families and friends met through public school and Oxford which dominated the literary world, the professions, politics and the City for most of the twentieth century. Arguably Waugh's main subject was also the focus of his life, which was gossip and stories about the intricately interlinked network of aristocratic families which dominated English life, linked via marriage, school, Oxford, the army, business and politics into a great matrix of power and influence wielded to protect and promote each other. The network of power and influence which satirists of the 1960s called 'the Establishment' and which still dominates English to this day: David Cameron Eton and Oxford; Boris Johnson Eton and Oxford.
Giving individual examples is not very impressive because it's only the sheer number of examples of the intermeshing of families of power and influence on every page, it's the cumulative affect of the matrices of power, which really conveys the ubiquity and control of this class.
Waugh was never a qualified, full-time journalist. During this unsettled period he spent a couple of months (April to May 1927) as a trainee journalist at the Daily Express, during which, by his own account, he filed no stories and spent a lot of time at the cinema. Or, as usual, getting drunk (p.151). It was the first of several skirmishes with journalism which were to build up to his comic masterpiece, Scoop. The general conclusion is clear: the journalists he saw in action were lying scoundrels who mostly fabricated their stories or exaggerated trivial events into 'stories' using a defined and limited set of rhetorical sleights of hand. He wrote pieces for magazines and newspapers to the end of his career, but never lost his amiable contempt for journalism and journalists.
First marriage, to she-Evelyn
In 1927 he met the honourable Evelyn Florence Margaret Winifred Gardner, the daughter of Lord and Lady Burghclere, who was sharing a flat with Pansy Pakenham (p.153). Waugh was on the rebound from the final failure of his intense and troubled relationship with Olivia Plunket-Greene, Gardner was tiring of being pursued by half a dozen suitors. Photos of her at the time confirm written accounts that she was boyish in appearance and no conventional beauty. She's was described as unusually immature, almost childish ('young for her age', p.155), she referred to Proust as Prousty-Wousty, to all her acquaintance as angel face or sweety pie – and this in a generation which Hastings goes out of her way to describe as consciously, modishly immature and childish.
Portrait of the two Evelyns by Olivia Wyndham (1928)
Hastings gives a fascinating account of Evelyn's proposal which was so casual as to be barely noticeable, along the lines of, 'Why don't we try it and see how it goes?' Gardner, who had (allegedly) already been engaged nine times, thought about it over night and next day replied, 'Yes, why not?' (p.163).
They were both 24, very immature, on the rebound from other relationships and also both wanted to escape the smothering tutelage of their parents. They both thought that getting married would set them free of parental restraint and define their adult identities.
Unfortunately, it didn't, but first 'the Evelyns' had to negotiate permission to marry with Gardner's mother, the formidable Lady Burghclere. She successfully blocked Waugh getting a job at the BBC (p.168). When Waugh submitted the MS of Decline and Fall to the publisher Duckworth's, the head of the firm, Gerald Duckworth' brother was married to Evelyn Gardner's aunt, Margaret, and was well aware of the family's snobbish disapproval of Waugh, and so turned the novel down. This is how it, the English establishment, works. Someone's cousin, brother, sister, mother, friend they were at public school or Oxford with intervenes to help out, give a leg up, or block their ambitions, in which case your turn to another set of brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts or uncles to help you out.
27 June 1928 the Evelyns got married despite all Lady B's objections, almost on a whim, in a disgustingly low church (St Paul's, Portman Square, p.175)), with few friends or family present. The writer Robert Byron (Eton and Oxford) gave Gardner away. Harold Acton (Eton and Oxford) was the best man. Brother Alec (Sherborne and Oxford) was a witness. A friend, Joyce Fagan, had moved out of a bijou little apartment in Canonbury and passed it on to the newly-married couple at a rent of £1 a week.
September 1928 Decline and Fall published to universal good reviews, from old timers such as Arnold Bennett and J.B. Priestly to new kids on the block like Cyril Connolly (Eton and Oxford). Waugh invited these important contacts to dinner or luncheon at the flat, and they were all enchanted by the 25-year-old pixies.
Literary agent
Alec introduced Waugh to his literary agent, A.D. Peters ( Haberdashers' Aske's and Cambridge) who was to be central to his career (p.182). Peters immediately started finding Waugh commissions to write articles about the younger generation for magazines and papers. Hastings features numerous passages describing Peters' complex and aggressive negotiations on his client's behalf with newspapers, magazines and publishers, both in Blighty and America. Several themes emerge:
the books were divided into two categories:
hardly anybody liked his travel books, they didn't sell, and Peters failed to find American publishers willing to take several of them on at all
the novels were mostly well reviewed and received but during the 1930s he never had a bestseller and so was permanently strapped for cash
this explains why Waugh continuously hustled for jobs from papers and magazines, endlessly coming up with ideas for features and articles: the problem here was that he often knocked them off at such great speed that magazines (such as Vogue, Harpers, Nash's and so on) quickly became cautious and took to turning down Waugh articles and stories
and this relates to something Hastings doesn't explicitly state, but which becomes apparent as you read through the book, which is that Waugh didn't really have many opinions about anything, or not opinions that could be translated into interesting articles; fresh off the back of Decline and Vile Bodies he could make some quids by claiming to be a spokesman for the generation of Bright Young Things; but by mid-1930s his actual opinions – conservative, reactionary Catholic in thrall to a rose-tinted image of the landed aristocracy was not very saleable
Waugh came up with the idea of writing articles about a cruise, which could then be compiled into a book as he was, throughout the 1930s, to come up with wizard wheezes for travel books. A number of his pals were good at this – Hastings refers to 'the intellectual avidity of Robert Byron…the exuberance of Peter Fleming' (p.269) [both of whom went to Eton and Oxford] – and it was an obvious way to go on an adventure and be paid for it.
The odd thing is that Hastings makes it crystal clear that Waugh hated travelling. He invariably ended up feeling sad and lonely and was often excruciatingly bored. In fact the account of his first trip to Abyssinia, Remote People, includes three short interludes entirely devoted to the problem of boredom. Reviewing the book Rebecca West made the witty point that a writer who writes about boredom almost invariably creates boredom in the reader (p.240), but I found this to be wrong.
I have travelled widely on my own (Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Thailand) and can vouch for the fact that there often are moments or days of excruciating loneliness and boredom. So I found the short passage in Remote People about boredom more interesting than some of the straight travel writing. It felt more personal and more true in much the same way as his reporting on the coronation of Haile Selassie was painfully accurate about its shabbiness and lack of glamour, or his description of the 'famous' monastery at Debra Lebanos as sordid and squalid.
Although he fibbed about some of the details, there is, overall, about the travel books, as the letters and diaries, a fundamental honesty, a self-exposing, excoriating, merciless honesty about himself and others in Waugh's writing which is, even when it's unattractive, admirable.
Anyway, it's interesting to learn that his four travel books were not well received. Publishers and reviewers didn't like them as much as the novels and they didn't sell anywhere near as well. I agree they don't have the well wrought artfulness of the novels but I enjoyed the three that I read for what you feel is the blunt unvarnished truth of Waugh's reporting and therefore accurate descriptions of faraway places in a long ago time which will never return.
His wife's betrayal
Wasn't a sudden, impulsive thing. Hastings gives good reasons why the Honourable Evelyn Gardner became unhappy.
She never really loved Waugh, she liked him and admired him.
She was a sickly child. In February 1929 they boarded the Stella Polaris for a cruise round the Mediterranean. This turned into a nightmare as Gardner fell very seriously ill and by the time they reached Port Said was taken off the ship and stretchered to the British hospital with double pneumonia and pleurisy. Despite his intense concern and nursing his sick wife every day, Waugh managed to turn in a creditable travel book, Labels, but Gardner continued to be frequently ill when they got back to London. A subconscious plea for more attention? Or indication of underlying unhappiness?
Trouble in the bedroom: Hastings doesn't give details but quotes Gardner saying Waugh was no good in bed and her suspicions that this was because he had learned all his sexual technique from sex with men (p.196); elsewhere Hastings links this with his sexual shyness and lack of confidence around women.
Both Gardner and Waugh married to escape from being at home and dominated by parents. They thought it would make them free and independent. Instead, once the initial euphoria had worn off, they realised they were alone and in difficult financial straits, as neither of them had a job.
Gardner's loneliness. Precisely in order to earn some money Waugh had to take himself off to a study or, more often, go out of London altogether, to stay with friends or in country inns, so he could concentrate on writing. Gardner was a fun-time 1920s party girl, and hated being left at home all alone night after night.
Hence, Waugh encouraged her to go out and socialise, recommending a close cadre of 'safe' male friends, one of whom was John Heygate (Eton and Oxford) (p.192). She spent more and more time with him, dashing, clever (job as assistant news editor at the BBC) and eventually, in July 1929, sent Waugh a letter saying she'd fallen in love with Heygate and wanted a separation (p.193).
Waugh was devastated. The cosy new base he'd built for his professional and personal life came crashing down. Hastings quotes friends who say that from that point onwards, a new note of cynicism and anger entered his personality and his work. Disgusted, he managed to see Gardner only once more in the rest of their lives (at the legal divorce proceedings).
Waugh based the very commonplace, drab and casually immoral character John Beaver in A Handful of Dust on Heygate. It is interesting to learn from Heygate's Wikipedia article that:
He did marry Gardner, in 1930, which was jolly decent of him – but they were divorced in 1936.
He was very right-wing, a Nazi sympathiser, and attended the 1935 Nuremberg Rally in the company of his friend the writer Henry Williamson, next to Unity and Diana Mitford. Lovely people.
Childishness
Hastings repeatedly emphasises the childishness of Waugh and his friends (p.251-25 3). From one point of view the whole affair with and marriage to Gardner was an apotheosis of childishness. She was famous in her circle for her lisping childish pronunciation, for giving everyone nursery nicknames, for looking and dressing like a pre-pubescent boy (a page boy, in Diana Mitford's description).
But it wasn't just them. Hastings considers their entire generation cultivated a childish irresponsibility. Maybe it was a rebellion against their heavy Victorian and Edwardian parents, and against the enormous tragedy of the Great War which their older brothers fought and died in. But calculated frivolity and heedless hedonism was, of course, the signature mode of the bright young things of the 1920s, and much of this had a deliberately childish aspect, a refusal to grow up or take anything seriously.
In Waugh's fiction this is probably best exemplified in various plotlines in Vile Bodies but in his social life Hastings shows how it was a deliberately cultivated pose in some circles of friends, for example the Lygon sisters. Hastings quotes postcards and letters they sent each other written in fake baby language, or with the interpolations of a fictional stupid character named Tommy (actually a joke at the expense of a neighbour of the Lygons, Tommy MacDougall, 'a dashing master of foxhounds', p.252) who interrupts the main text to ask stupid questions rendered in misspelt capitals:
When we meet again it will be gay and terribly exciting and not at all like a biscuit box
WY LIKE A BISKIT BOCKS PLESE?
Wait till you are a little older Tommy and then you will understand.
(quoted page 252)
I am going to live in Oxford all the summer and write a life of Gregory the Great.
WHO WAS GREGRY THE GRATE?
He was a famous pope, Tommy.
This style of gushing naivety is used by Waugh in the funny short story 'Cruise' which consists of postcards from an archetypally dim, naive, semi-illiterate flapper on a cruise back to her parents. The story uses a phrase which recurs in the actual Lygon correspondence, obviously a catchphrase of their group or the time, which is to use the gushingly simple-minded phrase 'God how sad' for anything which goes wrong from tea not being nice to riots in foreign cities (eventually abbreviated in letters to 'G how s'.p363). If you say it in a posh 1920s flapper voice it is quite funny.
Another notable group slang phrase was 'lascivious beast' for priest. For the rest of his life, in letters to close friends, Waugh regularly referred to priests he was meeting in England or abroad and even in Rome, as 'lascivious beasts' or just 'beasts'.
The three Lygon sisters and their fabulous country estate at Madresfield were very important psychologically to Waugh after the trauma of his divorce from Gardner. He recreated a fake childish world with them, which was maintained in their lively correspondence, and he dedicated Black Mischief to 'Mary and Dorothy Lygon' when it was published in October 1932.
Conversion to Catholicism
Obvious roots:
He was a very earnestly seriously Christian schoolboy.
Many people of his generation and in his immediate circle converted to Catholicism in the late 1920s.
The most interesting thing about Waugh's conversion is that it wasn't romantic or mystical, it was entirely intellectual (pp.225, 227, 229). Talking it over with Catholic friends and then with one or two high society Jesuits he came to the intellectual conviction that:
Christianity explained the world, humans and morality
Catholic Christianity, established in Rome by the martyr Saint Peter, was the oldest, truest, most universal, most enduring form of Christianity (p.225)
And that was it. From this intellectual conviction he never strayed. Details of liturgy and practice, aspects of theology, his emotions or feelings about religion, all these could change and he could happily take the mickey out of them because none of it altered his deep intellectual conviction about the fundamental truth of Roman Catholicism.
Evelyn always insisted that his response to his faith was purely intellectual and pragmatic. (p.487)
Thus Waugh could jokingly refer to priests as 'lascivious beasts' and any amount of levity and satire about individual churchmen without a qualm because it wasn't a question of respecting this or that piety; for Waugh Catholicism simply was the universal truth about the world, whether he was serious and solemn about it or messing about with friends. His own personal attitude didn't change the Truth. The Truth carried on regardless of anything he wrote or thought or said, that was its appeal.
It didn't do any harm that entering the Catholic church meant joining a small, embattled, unfashionable elite, and that Waugh identified solely with the old, aristocratic Catholic families and with only the best high society Jesuits – that suited his snobbish elitism very well. But it wasn't the fundamental motive.
Waugh wasn't very interested in politics ('contemptuous as he was of political life and all politicians', p.495). Arguably the one enduring subject of his work, diaries and letters was Gossip about people he knew or knew of. Even when he was 'reporting' from Abyssinia what excited him most was the court gossip as bruited among the catty diplomatic circles.
His politics followed his religion in the sense that he believed that Absolute Truth resided elsewhere, the human nature is fallen and deeply flawed, that perfection can never be achieved in this world and all attempts to achieve it inevitably end in repression. He handily defined his credo in an extended passage from the travel book he was commissioned to write about Mexico, Robbery Under Law, published in 1939 just as the world plunged into another world war. Because it's so central to everything he wrote it's obviously a carefully worded and thorough credo, it's worth repeating in full:
Let me, then, warn the reader that I was a Conservative when I went to Mexico and that everything I saw there strengthened my opinions.
I believe that man is, by nature, an exile and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth; That his chances of happiness and virtue, here, remain more or less constant through the centuries and, generally speaking, are not much affected by the political and economic conditions in which he lives; That the balance of good and ill tends to revert to a norm; That sudden changes of physical condition are usually ill, and are advocated by the wrong people for the wrong reasons; That the intellectual communists of today have personal, irrelevant grounds for their antagonism to society, which they are trying to exploit.
I believe in government; That men cannot live together without rules but that they should be kept at the bare minimum of safety; That there is no form of government ordained from God as being better than any other; That the anarchic elements in society are so strong that it is a whole-time task to keep the peace.
I believe that the inequalities of wealth and position are inevitable and that it is therefore meaningless to discuss the advantages of elimination; That men naturally arrange themselves in a system of classes; That such a system is necessary for any form of co-operation work, more particularly the work of keeping a nation together.
I believe in nationality; not in terms of race or of divine commissions for world conquest, but simply thus: mankind inevitably organizes itself in communities according to its geographical distribution; These communities by sharing a common history develop common characteristics and inspire local loyalty; The individual family develops most happily and fully when it accepts these natural limits.
A conservative is not merely an obstructionist, a brake on frivolous experiment. He has positive work to do.
Civilization has no force of its own beyond what it is given from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all.
Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity.
Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace.
Fascist Spain and Italy
This explains Waugh's support for Mussolini, when Fascist Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935, and for the forces of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Waugh visited Abyssinia three times and was appalled at the poverty, cruelty (read the description of Addis Ababa prison in Remote People) and barbarity of much of the country, which wasn't a country at all but an empire of subject peoples held together by force. He saw Italy as bringing European law and order and culture and, above all, Religion, to a corrupt and failing country.
I was shocked when I first read of his support for the 'noble cause' of Franco and the nationalists in Spain but it, of course, makes perfect sense. The Spanish socialist government may have been democratically elected but it embarked almost immediately on a campaign of closing churches and arresting priests. If you believe the Catholic Church is a vital connection between the creator God and his people, as Waugh very deeply did, then this simply could not be allowed and Franco's intervention to restore law and order and preserve the church of course received Waugh's initial support. Until it became clear that the Franco forces were committing atrocities every bit as bad or worse than the communists he vilified – at which point he washed his hands of the whole affair.
Waugh's Second World War
One quote says it all:
The ordinary soldiers disliked [Waugh] to such an extent that for a time [his superior officer, Lieutenant] Laycock felt obliged to set a guard on his sleeping quarters. (p.445)
Despite being every bit as committed to the war effort as his alter ego, Guy Crouchback, in the Sword of Honour trilogy, and despite showing real bravery in the face of enemy attack (Stuka divebombing in Crete) Waugh was universally disliked in the army. He had no idea how to deal with the ordinary working class soldiers, veering between heavy sarcasm and shouted orders, both of which failed to command affection or respect ('He bullied and bewildered them', p.445). His commander in 8 Commando, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Laycock (Eton and Sandhurst), told him he was so unpopular as to be virtually unemployable in the army (p.445).
He was an outsider to all the regular soldiers, bluff philistine types who instinctively took against this 'bookish chappie' with his smart repartee and corrosive cynicism. And when he did manage to wangle a place in a commando unit (as Crouchback does) Waugh was easily outclassed by genuine aristocrats such as Lord Randolph Churchill. His brown-nosing snobbish hero worship of these real blue blood types was so obvious, and repellent to onlookers, that Hastings is able to quote several written accounts describing it. His toadying to anyone with a title was a running joke with the WAAFs at the headquarters of Combined Operations (p.419).
Lord Lovat (Ampleforth and Oxford), the deputy brigade commander, wrote of Waugh:
'I had known him vaguely at Oxford, and, while I admired his literary genius, had marked him down as a greedy little man – a eunuch in appearance – who seemed desperately anxious to "get in" with the right people.' (quoted page 450)
I was surprised to learn that when Lovat ordered the scruffy, ill-disciplined Waugh to go to a barracks in Scotland to re-undergo basic training, and Waugh objected and took his complaint to Lovat's superior, General Haydon, the latter sacked him on the spot for insubordination. This was August 1943. Waugh remained in the army but without a post or position. This marks the end of his romance with the army. From now on he just wanted to get out, to return to civilian life and resume his career as a writer.
This disillusion and demotivation is strongly conveyed in the short prologue and epilogue to Brideshead Revisited where it is assigned to the novel's narrator, Charles Ryder.
Waugh's real wartime career closely followed the narrative of the Sword of Honour trilogy, or the trilogy was very closely based on his own experiences. But having read Hastings' account makes you realise that Waugh's greatest achievement in the novel was putting Crouchback on the same social level as the blue blood heroes he describes, and accepted by his fellow officers. Waugh was an outsider because he was a social-climbing, bookish cynic. In the trilogy Waugh converts the reasons for Waugh's outsiderness – bookish, sarcastic, cynical, bad at handling soldiers – into the far more noble and romantic and acceptable reasons for Crouchback's outsiderness, namely long-running depression over being dumped by his wife and a stern commitment to Catholic values which none of the other officers understands.
It's strange that sexual problems in the bedroom appear to have contributed to the swift collapse of Waugh's first marriage, and that Hastings periodically thereafter describes him as lacking sexual self-confidence, strange because his diaries and letters are full of sexual encounters – homosexual ones at school and Oxford and for a while afterwards in London, and then various encounters with prostitutes abroad. In Tangier, January 1934, Waugh explored the red light district and visited a brothel where he bought a 16 year old girl for 10 francs:
but I didn't enjoy her very much because she had a skin like sandpaper and a huge stomach which didn't show until she took off her clothes & then it was too late.
(Diary quoted p.297)
He then takes a 15 year old concubine whose face is entirely covered in blue tattoos and he thinks about setting up in an apartment of her own for his sole use (p.297). I was very struck by Waugh's own account of being in an Italian brothel and paying for a big black guy to sodomise a white youth on a divan, all artfully staged and arranged for the viewing pleasure of Waugh and his friends.
I suppose there's all the difference in the world between staging such events or, in more general terms, paying for sex, and having to manage consensual sex with a female partner, with someone you have to talk to later, arrange all the domestic chores, go out to dinner with and so on. That is an infinitely more complex situation to deal with and Waugh wouldn't be the first man to find it demanding and intimidating.
Waugh writes the word 'fuck' quite a lot. One of his female correspondents deprecated his use of the word in a letter to her, so it was obviously not freely used in his posh circles. I was struck by the bluntness of a letter Waugh wrote his second wife, Laura, about taking leave from the army at Christmas 1942, just after she had given birth to their third child:
There is an hotel at Shaftesbury with a very splendid sideboard. I think we might take a week end there soon when you are fuckable. (quoted page 444)
which certainly gives an indication of the way he wrote to her, and maybe spoke to her, but it is not necessarily indicative of the bluntly physical attitude he actually took to sex because we know from his countless other letters, that he cultivated a range of voices and styles (baby talk, high gossip, satire, facetious descriptions of army life) in his letters, depending on who they were written to. Everything he wrote was written for effect.
(The really surprising thing about that letter is that it was preserved and published. Who gave permission for it to be published? I wouldn't want my casual notes or texts to my wife to be published for the world to read.)
Strikingly, Waugh had no feel at all for music and hated almost all forms of it. At one point he comments that listening to Palestrina was purgatory while, at the other end of the musical spectrum, he loathed the loud jazz which became more and more dominant in London nightclubs as the 1920s progressed.
If you don't perceive music as the complex interlinking of melody, harmony, rhythm and syncopation, you tend to register it simply as noise and 'racket'. Waugh's loathing of music took most concrete form in his detestation of the 'wireless', the new-fangled radio which came in during the 1920s and became more and more and more popular during the 1930s and 40s. His was one of the few middle class households in the country which didn't possess a wireless and so didn't listen to Neville Chamberlain's broadcast about the outbreak of war in September 1939 (p.383).
Witness his short story 'The Sympathetic Passenger', lampooning a man who hates the wireless; or the scenes in Unconditional Surrender where Guy is convalescing in an RAF hospital whose 'long-haired boys' have radios everywhere in the building cranked up to full volume blaring out jazz music which drives Guy so mad he phones a friend and begs to be taken away.
'God, I hate Americans', quoted on p.299
The brash, superficial, loud, vulgar consumer capitalism of America came to epitomise everything Waugh hated about the modern age (p.221). Like most British writers he came to rely on sales in America to keep him solvent but that didn't stop him being very rude about America and Americans in correspondence and, sometimes, to their faces.
Evelyn had always referred with patronising contempt to Alec's fondness for America, and since the war had come to regard the United States as the apogee of everything that was tasteless, vulgar and barbaric. (p.511)
This is exemplified in the easy-to-overlook joke at the start of The Loved One where the two British protagonists are depicted on the verandah of a rundown bungalow at dusk, surrounded by decay, thick vegetation and the sound of cicadas, so that you think they must be in some god-forsaken colony in darkest Africa or the Far East and only slowly do you discover that they are in fact in Hollywood. Hastings pulls out some choice quotes from his huge correspondence:
The great difference between our manners and those of the Americans is that theirs are designed to promote cordiality, ours to protect privacy. (p.512)
My book [Brideshead Revisited] 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. (letter to John Betjeman, quoted p.512) [Betjeman went to Marlborough and Oxford]
The last 100 pages of the novel are marked by three themes:
1. Writing for money
Waugh continued to write a lot but the quality was often poor. Hastings records the umpteen commissions he received from magazines and newspapers, driving a very hard bargain, demanding the maximum rate possible, and then very often disappointing with work which was so hurried or roughshod, the magazines quite frequently refused to publish it or asked for their money back.
Of similar dubious or debatable quality are his handful of post-war stories, the novellas 'Scott-King's Modern Europe' (genesis, writing and reviews summarised pages 500 to 502) and 'Love Among the Ruins' (in Hastings' opinion, 'a nasty little tale', p.553) and the oddity which is The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (origin and writing described pages 560 to 567).
The Loved One is another oddity, which begins well and is full of lusciously funny details, but somehow fizzles out: he fails to find a plot to match the comic richness of his subject (American funeral homes). (Its genesis, writing and reception described on pages 514 to 522.)
Students and fans often overlook the overtly Catholic books he wrote, such as the novel about the Roman Empress Helena, discoverer of the 'True Cross' (1950) which was slammed in his own day and has never sold well (described pages 538 to 541). The 1930s biography of the Elizabethan martyr Thomas Campion (1935) and the biography he promised to write of his good friend, Catholic convert and Jesuit priest Ronald Knox (The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox, 1959) [Knox attended Eton and Oxford].
Then there were two poorly received travel books 'The Holy Places' (1952) and 'A Tourist in Africa' (1960). In 1961 he was paid £2,000 by the Daily Mail to go back to British Guiana on the eve of independence and write five articles on his impressions. These were so flat and incurious the Mail printed only one and demanded their money back (p.606).
The exception to all of this, and all the more remarkable for the mediocrity of the rest of his post-war output, are the three novels of the Sword of Honour trilogy (Men at Arms, described page 546 to 551; Officers and Gentlemen pp.571 to 573; Unconditional Surrender pp.594 to 599) which I find magnificent, richly funny, fascinating with social history, and deeply moving.
2. Comic dislike of his children
Waugh genuinely disliked small children and his own were no exception.
I abhor their company because I can only regard children as defective adults, hate their physical ineptitude, find their jokes flat and monotonous…The presence of my children affects me with deep weariness and depression. (quoted op.527)
The Waugh children (all 6 of them) were exiled to the nursery and, as soon as possible, sent off to prep schools. Waugh hated Christmas because of all the noise and disruption and had a little private party when they went back to their schools (p.527ff.). Waugh cultivated the pose of a father who detested his children and, although this must have been horrible to experience, it is often very funny to read about, especially when expressed in his deliberately outrageous letters.
His eldest son, Auberon Waugh (1939 to 2001: Downside and Oxford) went on to become a novelist, journalist and literary editor. He wrote an autobiography describing his unhappy childhood in detail and said that, as a boy, he would happily have swapped his father for a bosun's whistle (p.528).
3. Boredom and depression
Above all, Waugh was bored bored bored, often bored to death. He drank to excess to stave of boredom and depression, and the against-the-fashion pose of young fogey he cultivated in the 1930s, and which came to seem out of place during the People's War, crystallised into the persona of an angry, overweight, red-faced old buffer after the war. Waugh knew what he was doing; the persona he cultivated is described with precision in the self-portrait which opens The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold:
It was his modesty which needed protection and for this purpose, but without design, he gradually assumed this character of burlesque. He was neither a scholar nor a regular soldier; the part for which he cast himself was a combination of eccentric don and testy colonel and he acted it strenuously, before his children at Lychpole and his cronies in London, until it came to dominate his whole outward personality. When he ceased to be alone, when he swung into his club or stumped up the nursery stairs, he left half of himself behind and the other half swelled to fill its place. He offered the world a front of pomposity mitigated by indiscretion, that was as hard, bright and antiquated as a cuirass.
Hastings picks up the word 'pomposity' and quotes a passage from a letter to Diana Cooper:
Women don't understand pomposity. It is nearly always an absolutely private joke – one against the world. The last line of defence. (p.568)
All this is interesting because you don't find in fiction, or anywhere nowadays, a sympathetic explanation of the quality of pomposity. The idea of it being a sort of private joke is thought provoking, an insight into the way all kinds of people's odd manners might be taken as very personal jokes against the world…
Hastings gives example after example of Waugh's astounding rudeness to everyone he met, no matter how powerful and influential – the bitter arguments he had with even his closest friends, and the well-attested rows he had with his long-suffering wife, Laura.
One of the most loyal friends of his later years was the tough-minded socialite Ann Charteris (1913 to 1981) who had three husbands, first Lord O'Neill, secondly Lord Rothermere and then the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming (Eton and Sandhurst). Hastings quotes comments about Waugh from several of his close woman friends such as Diana Cooper and Nancy Mitford, but Ann Fleming put her finger on it when she wrote to her brother, Hugo, in 1955:
'Poor Evelyn, he is deeply unhappy – bored from morning till night and has developed a personality which he hates but cannot escape from.' (quoted p.558)
Not only was he a martyr to boredom but to insomnia and since the late 1930s had been taking various sleeping draughts which he mixed, against all medical advice, not in water but with creme de menthe. It was when he began, in addition, dosing himself with bromide that he developed first the physical and then the mental symptoms so accurately described in Pinfold.
He was invited to stay at the Flemings house, Goldeneye, in Jamaica where he was irascible and ungrateful. Ann Fleming again: 'Poor Evelyn – killing time is his trouble and not a night without sleeping pills for twenty years' (quoted p.571).
And when Nancy Mitford asked him, after he had paid her a bad-tempered visit in Paris, how he could reconcile behaving so badly and speaking so spitefully about everyone with his religion's words about loving your neighbour as yourself:
'He replied rather sadly that were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible…& anyway would have committed suicide years ago.' (quoted p.505)
Evelyn Waugh: A Biography by Selina Hastings (1994) was published by Sinclair-Stevenson in 1994. All references are to the 1995 Mandarin paperback edition.
Evelyn Waugh reviews
Decline and Fall (1928)
Vile Bodies (1930)
Remote People (1931)
Black Mischief (1932)
Ninety-Two Days (1934)
A Handful of Dust (1934)
Waugh in Abyssinia (1936)
Work Suspended (1942)
Put Out More Flags (1942)
Brideshead Revisited (1945)
Scott-King's Modern Europe (1947)
The Loved One (1948)
Men at Arms (1952)
Love Among the Ruins (1953)
What is Waugh satirising in 'Love Among The Ruins'?
Officers and Gentlemen (1955)
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957)
Unconditional Surrender (1961)
The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh
by Simon on January 19, 2022 • Permalink
Posted in Biography, Literature
Tagged A Handful of Dust, A Tourist in Africa, A.D. Peters, Abyssinia, Addis Ababa, Agatha Runcible, Alastair Graham, Alec Waugh, Ann Charteris, Ann Fleming, Anthony Powell, anti-Americanism, Arnold House, Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, Arthur Waugh, Aston Clinton, Auberon Waugh, "Wireless", Black Mischief, Bo, Boaz, boredom, Brian Howard, Brideshead Revisited, Bright Young Things, C.R.M.F. Cruttwell, Canonbury, Catherine Raban, Catholic Christianity, Cecil Beaton, Chapman and Hall, Charles Ryder's Schooldays, Crete, Cruise, Cyril Connolly, Daily Express, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Debra Lebanos, decline and fall, Depression, Diana Cooper, Diana Mitford, Dorothy Lygon, Duckworths, Eton College, Evelyn Gardner, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, Fascist Italy, Fascist Spain, funeral home, General Franco, Golders Green, Guy Crouchback, Haile Selassie, Helena, Henry Williamson, Hertford College, Hollywood, homosexuality, Hypocrites Club, Ian Fleming, Jazz, Jesuits, Joan Waugh, John Beaver, John Betjeman, John Heygate, Labels, Lady Burghclere, Lady Selina Hastings, Lancing College, Laura Herbert, Llandullas, Lord Burghclere, Lord Lovat, Lord Randolph Churchill, Love Among The Ruins, Madresfield, Maimie Lygon, Mary Herbert, Men at Arms, Mexico, Midsomer Norton, Mr Wu, Nancy Mitford, Nathaniel Woodard, Nazis, Neville Chamberlain, New College, Officers and Gentlemen, Olivia Plunkett-Greene, Olivia Wyndham, Oxford, Oxford Movement, Pansy Pakenham, Peter Fleming, private school, Remote People, Richard Pares, Robbery Under Law, Robert Byron, Robert Layock, Roman Catholicism, Ronald Knox, Scoop, Scott-King's Modern Europe, Sebastian Flyte, Second World War, Selina Hastings, Sherborne school, Spanish Civil War, Stinchcombe, Stukas, suicide, Sword of Honour, The Balance, the Holy Places, the honourable Evelyn Florence Margaret Winifred Gardner, The Loom of Youth, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, The Temple at Thatch, Thomas Campion, Tom Driberg, Tommy MacDougall, travel books, Unconditional Surrender, Underhill, Unity Mitford, Vile Bodies, war, West Hampstead, Winner Takes All, Yellow Book
Posted by Simon on January 19, 2022
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/01/19/evelyn-waugh-a-biography-selina-hastings/
Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh (1961)
'Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians–not very many perhaps–who felt this. Were there none in England?'
'God forgive me,' said Guy. 'I was one of them.'
(Mme. Kanyi talking to Guy Crouchback in Unconditional Surrender, page 232)
The second novel in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy followed on from the first with hardly a break, commencing on the afternoon of the same day the previous one ended. Here things are very different. At the end of the previous book, the 'hero' of the trilogy, Guy Crouchback, had arrived back in England eight weeks after hearing of the German invasion of Russia, on 22 June 1941, so roughly 22 August 1941. Unconditional Surrender only really gets going in August 1943, two years later i.e. there is a big gap, the central years of the war.
The book is divided into five sections or parts:
PROLOGUE. Locust Years
BOOK ONE. State Sword
BOOK TWO. Fin de Ligne
BOOK THREE. The Death Wish
EPILOGUE. Festival of Britain
1. Prologue: Locust Years
This brief introduction reviews Guy's recaps the previous 2 years, describing Guy's lack of direction when he got back from Crete in 1941, touching base with his father at his seaside hotel. He ends up helping to assemble and train a new generation of officers and men for the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. But in August 1943 he is told he is too old to accompany them abroad. More precisely, the new CO was his superior in Freetown back in 1940 and remembers the unfortunate incident of Guy giving a very sick colleague, Apthorpe, a bottle of whiskey with which he proceeded to drink himself to death. Further clarifying the timelines, Guy takes some leave and is at Matchet with his father when Italy surrenders on September 8 1943. Jumbo Trotter visits the barracks later the same month and fins Guy miserable so tells him to move in with him in London, while they find a new role for him. At his London club, Bellamy's, he bumps into Tommy Blackhouse, a commanding officer in the commandos, about to leave for Italy, but Guy burned his bridges when he turned down an offer to join them two years earlier, preferring to return to the Halberdiers. He's really screwed up his choices. But it is Tommy who suggests he might find a post in HOO HQ.
2. Book One: State Sword
HOO HQ Brompton
Anyway, as the narrative proper opens Guy is rising 40. In fact early on he has his 40th birthday, 29 October 1943, the day after Waugh's own birthday.
Guy has come to rest in one of the many departments belonging to Hazardous Offensive Operations Headquarters (HOO HQ) which has grown and spread since we first met it in 1940. Now it occupies multiple buildings in central and west London. Guy finds himself with a cramped office:
in the Venetian-Gothic brick edifice of the Royal Victorian Institute, a museum nobly planned but little frequented in the parish of Brompton.
A cramped space he shares, surreally, with 'a plaster reconstruction of a megalosaurus'. His job appears to be to receive memos and reports from other departments, sign or stamp or comment on them, before shuffling them along to other departments. Guy goes for a stroll round the building, which is a peg to introduce several other minor characters and for Waugh to describe the way a number of them are out and out communists. The alliance with Soviet Russia has allowed this political view to both spread and be more openly espoused and discussed, and not just among the 'working classes'. He imagines one particular lofty bureaucrat, Sir Ralph Brompton, the diplomatic adviser to HOO HQ who promotes alliances and support for communist forces everywhere, picturing Guy being put up against a wall and shot, in the best Soviet manner (p.29)
His stroll round the premises leads up to a conversation with Mr. Oates, who has recently installed an Electronic Personnel Selector, an early example of a computer and, as in a stage comedy or sitcom, he demonstrates its purpose in finding the right personnel for new jobs by discovering that there is a vacancy for a man with experience of Italy and some experience of the commandos – for Guy, in fact (p.31).
The sword of Stalingrad
Waugh novels are always multi-stranded or at least contain a number of characters and storylines. The central symbol of this book is the Sword of Stalingrad, a huge sword commissioned by the King himself and to be sent to Stalingrad in Russia as a symbol of solidarity with our Russian allies and testament to their fortitude in the brutal 6-month long siege. Silver, gold, rock-crystal and enamel had gone to its embellishment and throughout the novel it is placed on a fake altar in Westminster Cathedral where long queues of proles queue for a sight of it.
This sword, in Guy's view a spurious product of press relations and alliance with an immoral beast is contrasted with the noble and pure sword of Sir Roger of Waybroke, an Englishman who travelled on crusade but never made it to the Holy Land, was shipwrecked on the Italian coast, fought and fell for the local count who buried him in the local church of the little island, Santa Dulcina delle Rocce, where Guy spent the 1930s. Over the years Guy developed a religious/superstitious attachment to the knight and attributed to him the finest feelings of nobility and chivalry. At the start of the first novel in the trilogy, Men at Arms, before he leaves Santa Dulcina delle Rocce Guy touches the stone effigy of the knight and his sword, asking Sir Roger to pray for him and his embattled kingdom (i.e. Britain).
So the symbolism of the two swords, one ancient, venerable and noble, the other a modern, factitious and flashily popular fake, run through the text, symbolising the two sets of values, the two worldviews, the novel and Guy finds himself betwebelen, the dying old world and the new meritocratic one struggling to be born.
We are reintroduced to Ludovic, slippery, mysterious figure from book 2, who saved Guy when the two drifted across the Mediterranean in an open boat after the disastrous fall of Crete. We learn that he appears to have been picked up by the Sir Ralph Brompton we met a few pages earlier, way back in the 1930s, when he was a tall handsome junior officer in the Halberdiers. It is not stated but strongly implied that this was a homosexual affair, with the richer older man extracting Ludovic from his regiment and taking him abroad for five years to be his valet or secretary, depending on the situation, grooming and educating the lower class but handsome boy.
A decade has passed and Ludovic is a more imposing figure. He was given the Military Medical for conspicuous bravery for rescuing Guy and promoted. For a while the army couldn't find a role for him but he was eventually put in charge of a training base in the country which teaches army and partisan groups to parachute, a job which gave him plenty of time to write and hone his literary skills. Despite all this, when in London, he still looks up old Sir Ralph for tea.
Everard Spruce
Sir Ralph is, of course, well connected, and tells Ludovic he has passed on the latter's philosophical musings (which we saw Ludovic sketching out in the previous novel) on to the noted literary editor, Everard Spruce, editor of the fictional arts magazine Survival. This is a pretty obvious reference to the real-life noted editor Cyril Connolly and his arts magazine Horizon. Everard liked his Pensées and would like to meet him, though he thinks the title should be changed to something more modishly technical, like 'In Transit' (the sub-title, as it happens, of the second and final book of poems by Welsh war poet Alun Lewis).
(Waugh had already satirised Connolly and Horizon as Ambrose Silk and his magazine Ivory Tower in the 1942 novel, Put Out More Flags. Connolly was to devote the entire February 1948 issue of Horizon to Waugh's novel, The Loved One, so he had a keen understanding of Waugh's importance. It is interesting that Waugh describes Spruce/Connolly as 'a man who cherished no ambitions for the future, believing, despite the title of his monthly review, that the human race was destined to dissolve in chaos', interesting if true of Connolly. p.39. It may be also worth noting that, despite finding himself satirised in Waugh's novels, Connolly still described the trilogy as 'Unquestionably the finest novel to come out of the war', top quote on the cover of all three Penguin editions.)
Ludovic walks from Sir Ralph's rooms in Victoria to Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where Spruce lives and works, tended on by four young bohemian secretaries, just in time for a posh party. He notices the flimsy blackout curtain, the manuscripts and mess everywhere, the posh guests. He notes and observes. What makes Ludovic so compelling is the way he is the coldest of cold fish, cold and aloof.
The Kilbannocks
We met Ian and Kerstie Kilbannock in the previous book, with their house in Eaton Terrace. Kerstie is now a cipher clerk, Ian has steadily worked his way up the pole of military press and PR. They have struggled but been sensible and make do.
Virginia Troy comes round, Guy's ex-wife, who deserted him for Tommy Blackhouse, went on to have a string of affairs, married an American named Troy, has lived separated from him for ages. Now Troy reveals he's had private detectives trailing her and is divorcing her on the grounds of infidelity. She will be left without a cent. For the first time in her life she's panicking, She's come round with all her possessions to ask Kerstie to help her go through them and decide what to pawn.
For the last few years she has been forced to support Trimmer, the 'hero' of a farcically incompetent 'raid' on the French mainland, as he tours the factories of England to boost morale, but is hopelessly in love with her. It's Ian, as her employer at HOO HQ, who obliged her to 'support' Trimmer and the implication seems to be, obliged her to 'keep him happy' i.e. sleep with him (Trimmer).
The Loot
Waugh's anti-Americanism came out so fiercely in the caricature of three slobbish American journalists at the end of Officers and Gentlemen. It recurs here:
London was full of American soldiers, tall, slouching, friendly, woefully homesick young men who seemed always to be in search of somewhere to sit down. In the summer they had filled the parks and sat on the pavements round the once august mansions which had been assigned to them. For their comfort there swarmed out of the slums and across the bridges multitudes of drab, ill-favoured adolescent girls and their aunts and mothers, never before seen in the squares of Mayfair and Belgravia. These they passionately and publicly embraced, in the blackout and at high noon, and rewarded with chewing-gum, razor-blades and other rare trade-goods from their PX stores.
'Ill-favoured' lol, that's a nice phrase. And again when de Souza describes the experience of fighting in Italy:
'And then in Italy there were Americans all over the place clamouring for doughnuts and Coca-Cola and ice cream.' (p.95)
Anyway, towering above the general swarm of Yanks is a central and recurring figure, Lieutenant Padfield. The 'Loot' is a phenomenon, supernaturally present at every party, luncheon and dinner, knowing everyone in London, a finger in every pie. Incongruously, he goes to Everard Spruce's party, turns up at Guy's father's funeral, and turns out to have been gathering evidence against Virginia for Mr Troy's law firm.
Guy meets Ludovic
It is Guy's fortieth birthday. He sallies forth to Bellamy's where he meets Ian, just kicked out of his house for the evening by Kerstie who wants a girlie tete-a-tete with Virginia. Together with the Loot, Guy and Ian take a cab to Chelsea to Spruce's party. Spruce had just gotten round to finding time to talk to Ludovic who he thinks is a very important New Writer. There is a droll bit of dialogue where Spruce thinks the lead images in Ludovic's book of pensées (French for 'thoughts') are highly symbolic and/or derived from psychological sources, namely the theme of the drowned man and of the cave, while the reader of the trilogies knows that, in the last days of the ill-fated Crete campaign Ludovic holed up with other AWOL soldiers in safe caves, and then, in the local fishing boat which they got working in order to escape the advancing Germans, more than likely threw the 2 or 3 other sailors overboard in order to preserve himself and Guy. Spruce thinks these are deep symbolic images; whereas we know they are blunt facts.
'And besides these there seemed to me two poetic themes which occur again and again. There is the Drowned Sailor motif–an echo of the Waste Land perhaps? Had you Eliot consciously in mind?'
'Not Eliot,' said Ludovic. 'I don't think he was called Eliot.'
'Very interesting. And then there was the Cave image. You must have read a lot of Freudian psychology?'
'Not a lot. There was nothing psychological about the cave.'
When Guy appears at Spruce's party, Ludovic is almost paralysed with horror. The implication is that Ludovic did bump off the other men in the boat and is convinced Guy knows this and has tracked him down to confront him about it. Of course, Guy knows nothing and so is as puzzled as Spruce when Ludovic simply gets up and walks out of the party.
3. Book Two: Fin de Ligne
Virginia is pregnant
Virginia goes to a doctor who confirms she is pregnant. Must be by Trimmer. Yikes.
Guy is selected for parachute training
Guy goes for an interview about the job spat out by Mr Oates's Electronic Personnel Selector. Something about parachuting into north Italy. He'll need to go and do parachute training. Since the narrator has told us that Ludovic now manages a parachute training centre…
Guy's father's funeral
When Guy returns to the Transit Camp he finds a telegram from his sister telling him his father has died peacefully in his sleep. So he catches a train to Matchet with Box-Bender to attend the funeral whose Catholic elaborations are described in great detail. The county lord-lieutenant, a representative of the cardinal etc are in attendance and so, incongruously, is the Loot, who turns up everywhere. Angela and Guy are both astonished at the number of thank you letters their father has received; seems he quietly performed countless acts of charity, as well as giving a lot of his income to the needy.
Quantitative judgments don't apply
The last time they'd met, Guy and his father had a little disagreement about the policy of the Popes concerning compromising with the values of the modern world. Guy argued that the popes should have stood aloof from all politics since Italian unification (1871). A few days later his father writes him a kindly letter explaining that, in his opinion, this is not how Catholicism works. It works in the world and through the world. It cannot disengage and hold itself in an ivory castle. Who knows how many souls came to the Church and so were saved because of successive Popes' interventions:
Quantitative judgments don't apply. If only one soul was saved, that is full compensation for any amount of loss of "face."
This is a very important quote. Guy will repeat it to himself over and again as the novel progresses, regarding Virginia and in Yugoslavia.
The first abortionist
Kerstie prises the address of an illegal abortionist out of her very reluctant doctor, but when Virginia takes a taxi to the address it is bombed out. When she pops into nearby Claridge's she finds the Loot, who tells her about attending Mr Crouchback's funeral, and also the surprising news that he was quite well off. Planting a seed…
The voodoo abortionist
When Virginia tries a Black doctor who Kerstie's cleaner recommends as an abortionist, there is broad farce when Virginia discovers he has been hired by HOO HQ to perform voodoo ceremonies in order to give the Nazi leaders bad dreams! He asks her whether she has brought the scorpions he's requested as part of his ceremonies. No, replies Virginia. No, I haven't brought scorpions.
The witch doctor sits alongside Dr Glendening-Rees, the forager sent to teach the commando how to eat seaweed and heather in Officers and Gentlemen, in Waugh's gallery of military eccentrics.
Ludovic and the parachute training centre
It is November 1943 (p.117). Ludovic lives a quiet civilised life at his parachute training base in Essex (officially known as 'Number 4 Special Training Centre'). Until he receives notification that none other than Guy Crouchback is among the next batch of trainees. He is horrified, convinced it is fate.
In the bus en route to the training centre, Guy bumps into an old hand from the Halberdiers, de Souza who becomes very confidential, saying a number of the 12 'candidates' for the course probably know Sir Ralph Brompton. It's becoming pretty obvious Brompton is more than a communist sympathiser, but maybe a Soviet spy.
Sustained and very evocative description of parachute training. Also a sustained running joke about Ludovic's fantastically chilling effect on all around him. In fact, upon learning that Guy is coming for training he orders his staff to remove his name from all official documents, noticeboards, not to refer to him by name and to have his meals sent up to his room. De Souza notices this and makes a very funny running joke about their commanding officer having been overthrown in a coup and now being held hostage in his own room.
When it comes turn to do his first parachute jump Guy twists the same knee he injured all those years ago in the Halberdier barracks and is sent off to hospital whereupon Ludovic deigns to come down from his rooms and dine with the other 11 trainees, casting a wonderfully ghoulish coldness over the assembly. De Souza nicknames him Major Dracula. His number two seriously considers the possibility that his commanding officer has gone mad (mental illness and madness being, as we have so often observed, a recurrent theme in Waugh's work). As de Souza puts it:
'In my experience the more responsible posts in the army are largely filled by certifiable lunatics. They don't cause any more trouble than the sane ones.' (p.109)
Ludovic, like Apthorpe in the first book, only in a very different way, is a comic creation of genius. He consolidates his reputation for weirdness by insisting on buying a Pekinese dog. He clinches his second in command's view that he's gone mad when he exits the dinner singing the music hall song:
Jumbo rescues Guy who moves in with Uncle Peregrine
Guy hates it in the RAF hospital where the officers are rude and lackadaisical and which is bombarded all day long with the throbbing and wailing of jazz music from the wireless. He gets de Souza to pass on a message to Jumbo Trotter who promptly comes down to rescue him and take him back to his digs. However, Guy becomes depressed, so depressed that he takes up the offer of his uncle, his father's brother, the notorious bore Peregrine Crouchback, to move in with him in his house in Bourne Mansions, Carlisle Place. It is the time of the Tehran Conference 28 November to 1 December 1943.
Virginia pops in on Guy. She takes to popping in every day, bringing cards and gin. She inveigles dear old Uncle Peregrine into taking her out for dinner and explains that she is thinking of becoming a Catholic so she can return to being married to Guy. She is quite candid about being skint, needing money and being tired of gallivanting around. Peregrine is a bit put out because, in his ancient innocence, he'd been rather thinking she'd been popping in to see him.
Then one day she tells him the truth. Asks if he loves her. Very unusually for Waugh, there is a reference to sex, when she runs her hand up his leg under his bedclothes (Guy is still restricted to bed because of his knee) and gets no response. In fact Guy instinctively shies away from her. No attraction at all. It is then she makes the Great Revelation of the novel and tells him she is pregnant, with Trimmer's child.
To the astonishment of everyone in the know, namely Ian and Kerstie Kilbannock, Guy agrees on the spot to take her back, to get remarried in a civil ceremony (they were never parted, according to this theology). So Virginia and Ian, returning from Christmas 1943 discover Virginia has moved out of their house (where shes' been staying, much to Ian's mounting irritation) and moved straight into Uncle Peregine's house, room next to Guy's.
Kerstie goes straight round, Virginia is out, and she tells him point blank about Virginia's baby by Trimmer and is flabbergasted that Guy knows. He tries to explain. For over a decade he was lived alone, depressed, morose, occasionally wishing there was one good deed he could do in the world, one good deed which was genuinely selfless, entirely about helping someone else. By helping Virginia in her time of need, and by becoming father to the child, he helps a vulnerable woman and a baby who would be fatherless.
Kerstie says wartorn Europe is full of helpless women and orphans. But Guy says he can't help all of them. But he could help Virginia. He repeats the words of his father:
Remarrying Virginia and fathering the child are good deeds; loss of face before the whole world is secondary.
4. Book Three: The Death Wish
It is late February 1944 and Guy is flown in a Dakota plane via stopovers in Gibraltar and North Africa to Bari in Italy. Reports for duty to the Headquarters of the British Mission to the Anti-fascist Forces of National Liberation (Adriatic). He's been dispatched here because a) Ludovic lied about his success in parachute training in order to get ride of him (as we saw, Guy failed to complete the course due to a knee injury); and b) because in the bowels of HOO HQ Sir Ralph and colleagues think Guy will make a good clean cover for what they're really up to i.e. aiding the communist partisans.
Having signed in and met the Brigadier and the keen information officer Joe Cattermole, he is filled in about the Yugoslavs or 'Jugs' as the Brits call them. Keen to take all the help they can from the British, but their true leaders are the Russians, pan-Slavism. The partisans offer a permanent irritation to the Germans, who periodically carry out sweeps into the mountains. But the Germans' central aim is to keep communications with Greece open. Earlier in the war they were going to use this as a jumping off point for the Middle East, for Palestine or Egypt. Now, with the tide strongly against them, they need Yugoslavia open so when the time is right they can withdraw their Greek army out and up into mainland Europe.
Guy us kept hanging round. He socialises with the Brigadier who has a WAAF mistress, he lunches and dines out, though the food is as thin and grim as back in England. He meets the bloody Loot who, improbably enough, is being paid to recruit a full orchestra and revive Italian opera, with the aim of winning over Italian hearts and minds. It's proving difficult to find any singers.
In March 1943 Guy is informed he is to be parachuted into Croatia. He visits a church to make a last confession. He surprises us by confessing that he wants to die. It's important to catch all the nuances of this surprising declaration to so I quote at length:
Guy had no preparations to make for this journey except to prepare himself. He walked to the old town, where he found a dilapidated romanesque church where a priest was hearing confessions. Guy waited, took his turn and at length said: "Father, I wish to die.'
'Yes. How many times?'
'Almost all the time.'
The obscure figure behind the grill leant nearer. 'What was it you wished to do?'
'To die.'
'Yes. You have attempted suicide?'
'No.'
'Of what, then, are you accusing yourself? To wish to die is quite usual today. It may even be a very good disposition. You do not accuse yourself of despair?'
'No, Father; presumption. I am not fit to die.'
'There is no sin there. This is a mere scruple. Make an act of contrition for all the unrepented sins of your past life.' (p.170)
Guy's title is Military Liaison Officer, his job is to report on the military situation from the British Mission at a place called Begoy. Also to transcribe, encypher and send to Allied HQ in Italy the partisans' often exorbitant and detailed requirements. He is grudgingly accepted by the 'Jugs'. He is given a Serb 'translator' who speaks English with a brutal Noo Yawk accent and is, of course, a spy.
Time passes. One day the translator tells him a group of Jews is outside. A deputation ask him for help to travel to Italy. He explains that only the wounded and soldiers are flown out on the daily plane, it is not for civilians. They go away disgruntled. A month later he is asked to report on displaced persons in his area (UNRRA stands for United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration):
U.N.R.R.A. research team requires particulars displaced persons. Report any your district. This phrase, which was to be among the keywords of the decade, was as yet unfamiliar.
'What are "displaced persons"?' he asked the Squadron Leader.
'Aren't we all?' (p.179)
Guy goes to see the hundred or so Jewish refugees who are living in absolute squalor. His visit annoys the partisan authorities who call him to a meeting more like an interrogation and tell him it is not his place to interfere in internal matters of what will become their country. Guy explains he was only following direct orders from UNRRA and gets cross.
That night he gets a telegram saying Virginia has given birth to a son. The Crouchback line will be continued. It is 4 June 1944, the day Allied forces enter Rome.
Waning force
Waugh describes a general sense of power moving away from many of the London characters. On the eve of Operation Overlord pretty much everything HOO HQ ever cooked up seems redundant. General Whale has creates of old files burned. Ian Kilbannock tries to get a posting to follow the troops to Normandy: first-hand D-Day experience will be like gold dust in a post-war career.
Ludovic and Brideshead Revisited
Ludovic has been writing a novel and sending the instalments off to a typist in Scotland to type up the manuscript. It has a plot of Shakespearian improbability and is told in over-the-top prose. Waugh tells us half a dozen other novelists were working in the same vein of over-written nostalgia:
Had he known it, half a dozen other English writers, averting themselves sickly from privations of war and apprehensions of the social consequences of the peace, were even then severally and secretly, unknown to one another, to Everard Spruce, to Coney and to Frankie, composing or preparing to compose books which would turn from drab alleys of the thirties into the odorous gardens of a recent past transformed and illuminated by disordered memory and imagination…Nor was it for all its glitter a cheerful book. Melancholy suffused all its pages and deepened towards the close. (p.188)
I wonder if Waugh is describing his own magnum opus, Brideshead Revisited, which he wrote in an intense burst of work from December 1943 to June 1944. In his preface to the 1963 edition Waugh himself described Brideshead in similar terms:
It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster – the period of soya beans and Basic English – and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full stomach, I find distasteful.
Ludovic titles his over-written melodrama The Death Wish. To Ian Kilbannock's surprise, his exhausted superior General Whale one evening confides he is so tired he just wants to die (p.191). Virginia gives birth to her baby son and has a nurse and has people round to see it and it is christened into the Catholic faith, but she can't bring herself to look at it, refers to it as 'it' rather than 'he'.
Germany commences its operation of sending V1 rockets to land on London. Members of Bellamy's are not so exuberant as during the Blitz at the start of Officers and Gentlemen. The war is obviously winding down and the best is behind them. Opportunities are closed. Their record is their record. They listen to each night's series of random explosions glumly. Each night Virginia wonders if the next one she hears will be the one to kill her (p.191). She sends the baby with Angela down to her place in the country for safety.
Virginia's death
Sure enough a doodlebug kills Virginia, landing on the house in Carlisle Place one morning at 10am, killing Peregrine and the housekeeper, too. Angela sends an air mail latter which Guy opens after the daily plane has touched down with supplies. There is a very moving passage where Guy remembers what happened when Virginia moved in with him after their simple registrar ceremony of remarriage i.e. they went to bed together. Over the next few weeks his knee healed but so did a big hole in his heart.
Without passion or sentiment but in a friendly, cosy way they had resumed the pleasures of marriage and in the weeks while his knee mended the deep old wound in Guy's heart and pride healed also, as perhaps Virginia had intuitively known that it might do. January had been a month of content; a time of completion, not of initiation. When Guy was passed fit for active service and his move-order was issued, he had felt as though he were leaving a hospital where he had been skilfully treated, a place of grateful memory to which he had no particular wish to return. He did not mention Virginia's death to Frank then or later. (p.196)
I found this very moving indeed, the complexity of adult, mature, married love, after a lifetime of unhappiness and tribulation. Like many other moments in the trilogy it seems to me to strike exactly the right note of melancholy healing and closure.
Catholic convert Eloise Plessington asks Angela Box-Bender if she can take little baby Gervase off her hands, he is her godson after all. Their conversation is a pretext for speculating that maybe, from a theological point of view, this was the perfect moment for Virginia to be killed, when she was happy and had done a noble deed, a moment of maximum grace.
Some Jews escape
Guy is less moved by Virginia's death than the fact the UNRRA asked for 2 representatives of his displaced Jews to be sent back on the same flight. the partisans refuse to let the young, best educated couple leave because the husband is the only one who can keep the generator going which (intermittently) keeps the lights on in the little cluster of buildings they all inhabit. So Guy sends two other Jews off to Italy to plead the cause of their colleagues with the authorities.
The same flight brings in Frank de Souza who Guy and we have known since the first book when they were new officers in the Halberdiers together. De Souza has been promoted and is now Guy's superior officer. He puts Guy in the picture. The British have leaned on the Serb government in exile in London, complete with king, to accept a new set of ministers and advisers who are more friendly to the communists and the partisans and deprecate the Jug royalists, the Chetniks. Tito is going to meet Churchill. Basically de Souza is a representative of a government which is going to sell out the Yugoslav nation to the communists.
Guy visits the local priest to arrange a mass to be said for his dead wife. The communist partisans are deeply suspicious, arrest the priest, confiscate the food Guy gave him and de Souza gives him a dressing down. The key thing is not to offend the communist partisans. Guy is disgusted.
This whole sequence leads up to a showcase military operation put on to impress the Americans and persuade them of the British support for the partisans. The communists line up an attack on an isolated guardhouse, not manned by Germans or even by the Croatian fascist Ustaše but by the pretty hopeless Croatian home guard.
It is fitting that this fiasco is witnessed by Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke, now reduced to a shambling wreck of his former self, and by Ian Kilbannock, hyper ambitious to establish himself as a wide-ranging political commentator, along with the Loot, of course, and quite a throng of other military top brass (even someone from the Free French).
The plane crash
The plane Kilbannock, Ritchie-Hooke and his aide, the Loot and his tame British composer, the American general and his staff, a photographer and the Free Frenchman are flying in crashes in a field. It is very vividly described from the point of view of Ian who comes round to find himself lying hear the burning plane. The American general got most of them out. The crew were killed. Guy and staff from the British Mission and partisans arrive to help them onto stretchers and to a nearby sick bay.
The staged attack
The attack on the 'enemy' blockhouse, which is really more by way of being a small ancient castle, is, as you might expect, a fiasco. There are meant to be two brigades of partisans. One is on time the other is late, when the second one arrives the first opens fire on it. Precisely at 10am two RAF planes scream out of the blue and fire two missiles, the first pair completely missing the blockhouse, the second hitting the massive stone walls and barely scratching them. News arrives that a German patrol is on its way, at which point Waugh delivers a lovely comic exchange between the American general who's been flown all this way to observe the indomitable partisans in action and his partisan translator:
'A German armoured column has been warned and is on its way here.'
'What do your men do about that?'
'Before a German armoured column they disperse. That is the secret of our great and many victories.' (p.221)
The partisans are sneaking away and de Souza announces lunch, when everyone sees an extraordinary spectacle. Revived by his close shave with death the night before, Ben Ritchie-Hooke advances across the bridge towards the solid little castle all alone except for the American photographer who tumbles around him like a dwarf in a medieval court. Ben assumes the partisans will be following his gallant charge but they have disappeared and he is shot down in a hail of Croat bullets. The German patrol which arrives a little later is mystified by this single-handed attack on a fortified position by a British major-general, attended in one account by a small boy, in another by a midget. War as farcical tragedy, tragic farce. Chatting with the General's aide later, Guy learns he had, for some time, expressed a wish to die in battle. Like so many others, he, too, had a death wish.
The Jews
There's a funeral service for the dead in the plane then things settle down. The Germans are withdrawing. The American general gives the go-ahead for the partisans to receive many more supplies. These are flown in on a daily basis. There's little form Guy to do except watch. August turns into September 1944. Guy asks de Souza to send messages about the transport of the hundred Jews to Italy. Messages go back and forth.
At the end of September de Souza leaves. He explains that Tito has gone over to the Russians lock, stock and barrel. Winston had hoped to set up a coalition government in Belgrade comprising different ethnic groups and a political mix i.e. democrats and liberals. Not going to happen now: it's going to be a Soviet dictatorship.
Things go quiet. The local priest is gone, who knows where, his house requisitioned by communists. Guy is followed everywhere by his translator-minder, who he likes to torment by going for long tramps through the wet countryside. On his 41st birthday, 29 October 1944, Guy receives the thrilling news that four Dakota planes will fly in to evacuate the Jews. The Jews are rounded up and marched to the landing field but a very thick fog prevents their despatch. Twice in the next couple of weeks the planes arrive but cannot land. Guy is obsessed. He prays to God to clear the fogs. God doesn't listen, Then the first snows fall. There will be no more landings till the spring.
Then news comes of a special air drop of supplies solely for the Jews. But the partisan general in charge of the committee which liaises with the British Mission refuses to accept this and, when the supplies are parachuted in, confiscates them all.
Also in October 1944 Belgrade was liberated by the Soviet Red Army, Yugoslav Partisans, and the Bulgarian Army. With no explanation the Jews are suddenly given the supplies which had been impounded and for a week they appear in public wearing a bizarre array of English clothes and properly fed for the first time in a year. Then they disappear. The creepy young translator to the communist commissar explains that partisans and fighting forces complained that they had no boots or winter coats. The goods have been redistributed and the Jews moved to other accommodation.
A few days later Guy encounters the young Jewish woman who speaks Italian and, the first time he saw them, translated. She explains it was the peasants who complained about the largesse shown to the Jews and the partisans are dependent on the peasants for food. She explains the Jews have been moved to a former Nazi prison camp. Guy is horrified and says he will kick up a fuss when he is flown back to Italy. At which point this Jewess, Mme. Kanyi, delivers the moral of this part of the novel and maybe of the sequence as a whole:
'There was a time when I thought that all I needed for happiness was to leave. Our people feel that. They must move away from evil. Some hope to find homes in Palestine. Most look no farther than Italy–just to cross the water, like crossing the Red Sea. Is there any place that is free from evil? It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These Communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians–not very many perhaps–who felt this. Were there none in England?'
'God forgive me,' said Guy. 'I was one of them.' (p.232)
Guy is ordered to leave Begoy. He drives through ruined villages to the coast at Split. He is ordered to Dubrovnik to liaise between a small British force which had landed under the impression it was among friends only to find itself impounded by the communist partisans.
In mid-February 1945 he is withdrawn along with the British party and finds himself in Bari a year after he arrived. There he learns that the Jews of Begoy were finally liberated when a private American sponsor paid for an expedition of trucks to drive from Italy to collect them, bribing the partisans to release them. When Guy visits them he finds them in yet another camp guarded by soldiers, albeit British. But Mme. Kanyi and her husband are not among them. Through an interpreter Guy learns they were taken off the truck by the partisans of Begoy.
Finally he gets some sense from an odious functionary named Gilpin who we first met at the parachute training centre where Guy overheard him whispering to de Souza, linking both to Sir Ralph Brompton and his set of communist agents. Now this self-satisfied lickspittle rattles off a list of typically inaccurate communist accusations – that she was the mistress of the British Liaison Officer (meaning him, Guy), that her husband sabotaged the power plant (when he was the only engineer who could keep it going), that she was caught in possession of counter-revolutionary propaganda (before leaving Guy had given her the Mission's collection of American glossy magazines). It is a pack of lies which Gilpin goes on to compound when Gilpin goes on to say that Guy himself was almost had up on a disciplinary charge for consorting with her, but one of the other communist officers decided to let him off. He goes on to say that the couple were tried by a Peoples' Court and 'You may be sure that justice has been done.'
This is such a travesty of the truth, such an inversion of 'justice', such a betrayal of any ideas of a just war and honour, all delivered with an unctuous smile by a vile and vindictive little functionary that Guy clenches his fist to punch him. But what would be the point? It is the final absolute crushing of all Guy's ideals of honour, charity and justice in this world.
5. Epilogue: Festival of Britain
The Festival if Britain took place in London starting in May 1951. In this novel it is the occasion for a party when Tommy Blackhouse, now a much-decorated general, assembles 15 old comrades for dinner at Bellamy's. On the same evening Arthur Box-Bender is giving a party for his daughter's 18th birthday, which is, the narrator emphasises, absolutely nothing like the glittering 'coming out' balls held for the young ladies of his generation. Disgusted by the manners and clothes of the younger generation, Box-Bender takes the first opportunity to get away from it and strolls down to St James's Street and into Bellamy's just as the raucous Blackhouse party comes tumbling out of its room. Typically quick drunken conversations allow Waugh very beautifully and neatly, as in an old fashioned novel, to tell us the post-war fates of his characters:
Tommy Blackhouse had returned to England in May. He was retiring from the army with many decorations, a new, pretty wife and the rank of major-general.
Ivor Claire had spent six months in Burma with the Chindits, had done well, collected a D.S.O. and an honourably incapacitating wound. He was often in Bellamy's now. His brief period of disgrace was set aside and almost forgotten.
Trimmer had disappeared. All Tommy's enquiries failed to find any trace of him. Some said he had jumped ship in South Africa. Nothing was known certainly.
Box-Bender lost his seat in parliament in the great Labour landslide of 1945.
Box-Bender was defeated by Gilpin, the revolting wretch who gloatingly told Guy about the execution of the Kanyis. He is now a Labour MP, not popular in the House but making his mark and had lately become an under-secretary.
Guy has sold the Castello Crouchback. To Ludovic of all people.
Ludovic's long novel, The Death Wish, which we saw him working on, old nearly a million copies in America and they've just filmed it. He's rich.
Improbably, but in a gesture towards poetic justice, it appears 'the Loot', Lieutenant Padfield, has become Ludovic's fixer and general factotum.
Guy has married Domenica, daughter of Lady Plessington, a family friend and godmother to Gervase (Guy's son by Virginia). He has taken back the property at Broome and is just about making a go of running the farm. In the end, after all his tribulations, things turn out well for Guy.
Taken individually all three novels are brilliant, combining comedy, complicated storylines, vivid characters and an extraordinary grasp of the complexities of military and social life during the war. Taken together, the Sword of Honour trilogy is surely one of the greatest achievements of English literature in the twentieth century.
The final sequence of events in which Guy agrees to marry Virginia and thus do the one good, selfless deed he had been seeking to do since the start of the war, in which she is then killed by a V rocket but the baby saved; and his long attempts to do right by the Jews in Croatia; all make for a very moving, sometimes overwhelming cocktail of emotions. It feels deep and rich and true to the complex mix of hopes and hard work and frustration and small victories which life is really like. The trilogy as a whole is an extraordinary achievement.
History of the language
New phrases
It's a very minor point, but these books contain occasional references to phrases which have just entered the language at the moment he's describing. Thus book one refers to 'the already advertised spirit of Dunkirk'. The second half of book two is titled 'In The Picture', a phrase Waugh ironically describes thus:
Trimmer remained quiet while he was 'put in the picture'. It was significant, Ian Kilbannock reflected while he listened to the exposition of GSO II (Planning) that this metaphoric use of 'picture' had come into vogue at the time when all the painters of the world had finally abandoned lucidity.
As this snippet suggests, Waugh is old bufferishly critical, disdainful or contemptuous of these new-fangled phrases, using antiseptic speech marks to handle them with. Same happens in this book, when the literary editor Spruce is said to receive 'fan letters' (p.42). When he refers to Guy taking the 'tube railway' (p.47) he sounds like a ridiculous old fuddy-duddy. Or when Virginia says:
'I just feel I ought to have what Mr. Troy calls a 'check-up.'"
He tells us the working class term 'ducks' had become prevalent during the Blitz. Here's Mrs Bristow, Kerstie Kilbannock's cleaner:
"Just off, ducks," she said using a form of address that had become prevalent during the blitz.
In fact Waugh gives us more samples of the working class speech of the time than in the previous books:
'Sorry, sir,' said the [the Staff Captain's batman] as he discovered the tousled figure. 'Didn't know you was here.' (p.114)
'Cor,' he said, 'just take a dekko at the little perisher.' (p.115)
Americanisms
Having had occasional contact with the film world during the 1930s (and having, outside the timeline of the novel, been to Hollywood in 1947) Waugh has picked up plenty of Americanisms which he handles with distaste:
Stirred by the heavy North African wine, de Souza's imagination rolled into action as though at a "story conference" of jaded script-writers. (p.111)
Other Americanisms are handled with care:
Here was something most unwelcome, put into my hands; something which I believe the Americans describe as 'beyond the call of duty'; not the normal behaviour of an officer and a gentleman… (p.151)
And American food, creeping in everywhere:
A civilian waiter brought them their pink gins. Guy asked him in Italian for olives. He answered in English almost scornfully: "No olives for senior officers," and brought American peanuts. (p.157)
It is sweet that he uses phrases like 'motor bus' and 'wireless'. In this respect Waugh is a good example of the futility of thinking that if you use old-fashioned words and are openly contemptuous of new-fangled phrases, you can somehow prevent social change. No-one can prevent social change nor the steady evolution of the language. King Canute on the beach.
The wireless
It is interesting that Waugh detested the earliest signs of muzak. This occasionally crops up in the other novels, where he had shown a fuddy-duddy objection to the 'wireless' and, surprisingly for a member of the late 1920s Bright Young Things, an antipathy to jazz. It becomes more noticeable in this novel. Thus the ageing Guy shows a mild resentment of:
The new young officers were conscripts who liked to spend their leisure listening to jazz on the wireless.
And at the parachute training centre the incessant music from the 'wireless' infuriates the usually mild-mannered Guy:
'Can't you stop this infernal noise?'
'What noise was that?'
'The wireless.'
'Oh, no. I couldn't do that. It's laid on special. Piped all through the camp. It isn't all wireless anyway. Some of it's records. You'll soon find you get so you don't notice it.'
It is characteristic of Waugh that he associates enjoyment of 'wireless' programmes to the uneducated lower classes, for example, Kerstie Kilbannock's cleaner:
Kerstie did not sleep long, but when she came downstairs at noon, she found that the lure of Bellamy's had proved stronger than Ian's caution and that the house was empty save for Mrs. Bristow, who was crowning her morning's labour with a cup of tea and a performance on the wireless of "Music While You Work." (p.90)
Ian and Kerstie Kilbannock returned to London from Scotland on the night of Childermas. He went straight to his office, she home, where Mrs. Bristow was smoking a cigarette and listening to the wireless. (p.148)
Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1961. All references are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition.
Unconditional Surrender online
by Simon on January 7, 2022 • Permalink
Posted in Comedy, Literature, Novel, Second World War
Tagged Alun Lewis, Ambrose Silk, Angela Box-Bender, antisemitism, Apthorpe, Begoy, Belgrade, Bellamy's, Ben Ritchie-Hooke, Bourne Mansions, Brideshead Revisited, Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke, Carlisle Place, Chetniks, Cheyne Walk, comedy, Crete, Croatia, Crouchback, Cyril Connolly, D-Day, de Souza, Death Wish, Dr Glendening-Rees, Electronic Personnel Selector, Eloise Plessington, Evelyn Waugh, Everard Spruce, Festival of Britain, Frank de Souza, General Whale, Gilpin, Hazardous Offensive Operations Headquarters, HOO HQ, Ian Kilbannock, Italy, Ivor Claire, Jews, Joe Cattermole, Jumbo Trotter, Kerstie Kilbannock, Lady Plessington, Lieutenant Padfield, Ludovic, Marshall Tito, Matchet, Men at Arms, Mme. Kanyi, Mr. Oates, Mrs Bristow, Music While You Work, novel, Operation Overlord, partisans, Politics, Red Army, Royal Corps of Halberdiers, Royal Victorian Institute, Santa Dulcina delle Rocce, satire, Second World War, Sir Ralph Brompton, Sir Roger of Waybroke, social history, Soviet Russia, Sword of Honour trilogy, sword of Stalingrad, Tehran Conference, the Loot, Tito, Tommy Blackhouse, Trimmer, Uncle Peregrine, Unconditional Surrender, United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, UNRRA, Ustaše, Virginia Troy, Westminster Cathedral, Yugoslavia
Posted by Simon on January 7, 2022
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/01/07/unconditional-surrender-evelyn-waugh/
Poetry of the Thirties edited by Robin Skelton (1964)
Even before they were quite over, the Thirties took on the appearance of myth… It is rare for a decade to be so self-conscious… ( Robin Skelton in his introduction )
Robin Skelton
Robin Skelton (1925 to 1997) was a British-born academic, writer, poet, and anthologist. In 1963 he emigrated to Canada and taught at universities there. He appears to have written an astonishing 62 books of verse (some of them, admittedly, explanations of theory and metre), five novels, 15 non-fiction books and edited some 23 anthologies.
This Penguin paperback edition of poetry from the 1930s is similarly profuse and prolific. It contains some 169 poems by no fewer than 43 poets, a very wide-ranging selection.
Some of the poets are super-famous – W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, John Betjeman. Some more niche, like the Surrealist poets David Gascoyne, Hugh Sykes Davies and Philip O'Connor. Some wrote little but have cult followings, like the fierce young communist John Cornford or the eccentric academic William Empson. Many are worthy but dull, like the famous but boring Cecil Day-Lewis and Stephen Spender.
Some are famous for other things, for example, Laurie Lee, who went on in the 1950s to write the phenomenally successful memoirs Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning but is represented here by three minimalist lyrics written in Spain.
And half a dozen or so of Skelton's choices are of pretty obscure figures – Clere Parsons, Ronald Bottral, F.T. Price, Roger Roughton. Who? Did Skelton make some of these up? It would be funny if he had.
What the breadth of this selection is obviously designed to do is to make us look far beyond the usual suspects, particularly the over-hyped Auden Group poets, and consider a much wider range of Thirties poetry – and in this respect, it works.
Skelton arranges the poems by theme, not by poet, juxtaposing poems on the same topics by widely different authors in order to compare and contrast approaches and styles, making the anthology what he describes as a kind of 'critical essay'.
He takes as his period anything published in a periodical between 1 January 1930 and 31 December 1939, extended to the end of 1940 in the case of poems which first appeared in books, which have a slower turnaround than magazines.
The Thirties generation
Skelton only includes poets born between 1904 and 1916. He argues that anyone born after 1904 had no conscious experience of the idyllic pre-war Edwardian civilisation. They came to adolescence during the Great War or the turbulent years afterwards leading up to the 1926 General Strike, and had barely learned how to party before the 1929 Wall Street Crash inaugurated the Great Depression.
At the other end of the period, some poets born in 1916 were still recognisably of the Thirties generation but much after that and they came to maturity just as the second war started and so belong to a different era.
Schoolboy view of war
Almost all the poets of the Thirties went to public schools which had officer training corps, maps on the walls showing the progress of the Great War and jingoistic masters. Their parents, teachers, newspapers and books gave them a vivid impression of the heroic camaraderie of war. (It's important to remember that the anti-war poems of Siegfried Sassoon were known only to a tiny literary circle and that the anti-war sentiments which we take for granted today didn't really become widespread until the 1960s.)
It is no surprise that the poetry of a generation which grew up during the Great War for Civilisation is stuffed with images of war: armies, soldiers, the Enemy, the Leader are routinely referred to; there are maps, lots of maps; and 'frontier' is a particularly resonant buzzword (for example, Auden's play On the Frontier, Edward Upward's first novel, Journey to the Border).
Now over the map that took ten million years
Of rain and sun to crust like boiler-slag,
The lines of fighting men progress like caterpillars,
Impersonally looping between the leaf and twig.
(from It was easier by Ruthven Todd, 1939)
You above all who have come to the far end, victims
Of a run-down machine, who can bear it no longer;
Whether in easy chairs chafing at impotence
Or against hunger, bullies and spies preserving
The nerve for action, the spark of indignation –
Need fight in the dark no more, you know your enemies.
You shall be leaders when zero hour is signalled,
Wielders of power and welders of a new world.
(from The Magnetic Mountain poem 32 by Cecil Day-Lewis, 1933)
Here war is simple like a monument:
A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan
For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.
But ideas can be true although men die,
And we can watch a thousand faces
Made active by one lie:
And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking; Dachau.
(poem XVI from In Time of War by W.H. Auden, 1939)
They wanted to be part of a larger community and so the era was characterised by movements, gangs and cliques. There were lots of manifestos and anthologies with prefaces earnestly explaining why the poetry of their generation was different. Not only that, but the poets felt that they had to embody the new values they promoted. The literary culture was high-minded and unforgiving, epitomised by the high standards of the magazine New Verse (1933 to 1939) which flayed any poet who 'sold out' to the establishment. When C. Day-Lewis agreed to be a judge for some book club he was mercilessly attacked by other left-wingers for 'selling out', a mindset on the Left which lasted the rest of the century.
The accusations that the movement was based round a small clique of pals who boosted each other's works was reinforced by the way the Auden Gang did collaborate and help each other: for example, that Auden and his best friend Christopher Isherwood collaborated on no fewer than three plays – The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1937) and On the Frontier (1938) – as well as a joint account of their visit to China during the Sino-Japanese War, Journey to a War (1939). Auden and MacNeice co-wrote an account of their visit to Iceland, Letters From Iceland (1937), and the leading composer of the new generation, Benjamin Britten, was also a collaborator with Auden, writing music for F6 and Frontier, as well as setting poems from On This Island and music for the documentary film Night Mail for which Auden wrote the verse commentary. All very pally.
'New' was a buzzword, new verse, new times, new politics, new men. Art Deco was an entirely post-war style they grew up with, new suburbs were being built, in new styles, flats and maisonettes suggested new types of urban living, memorably expressed (if with the obscurity typical of his earliest poems) by Auden:
… Publish each healer that in city lives
Or country houses at the end of drives;
Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at
New styles of architecture, a change of heart.
(from Poem XXX by W.H. Auden, 1929)
Two key early anthologies of the era which helped introduce the young generation to a wider audience were New Signatures (1932) and New Country (1933), both edited by Michael Roberts, and the most influential magazine was New Verse edited from 1933 to 1939 by the combative poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson. New Writing was a popular literary periodical in book format founded in 1936 by John Lehmann and committed to anti-fascism, which featured works by the new young writers.
Even Oswald Mosley's first independent political party was initially named simply the New Party (founded February 1931) before it morphed into the British Union of Fascists (October 1932). Everything had to be new.
The Great Depression began with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 when the poets were in their early 20s and lasted until 1933, during which huge swathes of the industrial economy collapsed throwing millions out of work. The international nature of the crisis (which began in the USA and affected America worst) convinced many intellectuals that capitalism was entering its last great crisis. The entire political and economic system from the King through to the Houses of Parliament seemed incapable of dealing with the social impact of the crash.
These confident young men castigated it as 'the old order', 'the dying order', 'the old gang' and routinely castigated pompous, top-hatted ministers presiding over a country where the poor were living in squalor.
In England the handsome Minister with the second
and a half chin and his heart-shaped mind
hanging on his thin watch-chain, the Minister
with gout who shaves low on his holly-stem neck…
(from The Non-Interveners by Geoffrey Grigson, 1937)
The economic crisis had only just begun to recede when Hitler came to power in Germany (in January 1933). For anyone on the Left (which was almost all of the poets) the accession to power of an overtly anti-semitic fascist in Europe's largest country was a disaster, and from then on virtually each new month brought shocking news as Hitler banned trade unions, all other political parties, murdered his opponents, passed discriminatory laws against Jews and so on.
All this took place with the tacit acquiescence of the liberal democracies Britain and France, which increased the contempt and vehemence of the young poets for their cowardly elders. By the mid-30s Hitler was trebling the size of Germany's army, navy and air force amid the sense of an accelerating stampede towards war which affected all of Europe and produced a tone of political anxiety in most writers.
Whatever their precise position, the poets reflected the general sense that ordinary life was overshadowed and dominated by menacing political issues, and a widespread feeling that poetry must address the huge issues of the day.
This underlies one of the verbal tics of thirties poetry, which is the widespread use of the word 'now' used to mean, 'right here, right now', 'now this second', to convey a sense of burning urgency, that this – the Spanish war, the threat of communist revolution – is happening now. Wake up!
Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers…
(from Look, stranger by W.H. Auden, 1935)
The nowness of the poet's embattled present and urgent call to action is contrasted with the cowardly passivity of the old gang, the fathers, the Establishment, and is envisioned as leading briskly to a Glorious Future which is just around the corner, come the revolution.
The biggest group or 'gang' was World Communism which owned All of Pat History and the Future of The Human Race. Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, Edward Upward, Hugh Sykes Davies, John Cornford and David Gascoyne are just some of the notable writers who joined the Communist Party of Great Britain during the 1930s. Some of them wrote earnest books arguing that communism represented the Future of Humanity and of Art (C. Day-Lewis Revolution in Writing, 1935, Stephen Spender Forward from Liberalism, 1937).
The 19 February 1937 edition of the Daily Worker featured an article by Spender titled 'I Join The Communist Party' and an editorial which give you a good flavour of the oleaginous tone of communist propaganda:
The Communist Party warmly welcomes comrade Spender to its ranks as a leading representative of the growing army of all thinking people, writers, artists and intellectuals who are taking their stand with the working class in the issues of our epoch…'
(quoted in Cunningham, page 43)
Louis MacNeice was one among many who tried to express their revolutionary feelings in verse but, being MacNeice, he characteristically humanises his views with everyday observation and imagery:
But some refusing harness and more who are refused it
Would pray that another and a better Kingdom come,
Which now is sketched in the air or travestied in slogans
Written in chalk or tar on stucco or plaster-board
But in time may find its body in men's bodies,
Its law and order in their heart's accord,
Where skill will no longer languish nor energy be trammelled
To competition and graft,
Exploited in subservience but not allegiance
To an utterly lost and daft
System that gives a few at fancy prices
Their fancy lives
While ninety-nine in the hundred who never attend the banquet
Must wash the grease of ages off the knives.
(from part III of Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice, 1939)
Others had visionary hopes for the new world and new way of living which the revolution would usher in:
After the revolution, all that we have seen
Flitting as shadows on the flatness of the screen
Will stand out solid, will walk for all to touch
For doubters to thrust hands in and cry, yes, it is such…
(from Instructions by Charles Madge, 1933)
In less skilful hands, communist urgency could degenerate into not much more than abuse:
No more shall men take pride in paper and gold
in furs in cars in servants in spoons in knives.
But they shall love instead their friends and their wives,
owning their bodies at last, things they have sold.
Come away then,
you fat man!
You don't want your watch-chain.
But don't interfere with us, we know you too well.
If you do that you will lose your top hat
and be knocked on the head until you are dead…
(from Hymn by Rex Warner, 1933)
By contrast with the above, John Cornford, who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War and died fighting, aged just 21, really means it. He only wrote a handful of poems before his early death but he was a true believer. In Full Moon at Tierz Cornford expresses doubts and worries, but out of them comes the burning conviction of a revolutionary anthem.
Freedom is an easily spoken word
But facts are stubborn things. Here, too, in Spain
Our fight's not won till the workers of the all the world
Stand by our guard on Huesca's plain
Swear that our dead fought not in vain,
Raise the red flag triumphantly
For Communism and for liberty.
(from Full Moon at Tierz: Before The Storming of Huesca, 1936)
The Spanish Civil War
When General Franco staged his coup against the democratically elected socialist Spanish government in July 1936 he expected to seize power within days. Instead his putsch turned into a gruelling and barbaric three-year-long civil war. Once again, as in their boyhoods, the British poets found themselves reading daily accounts of battles, and statistics about the dead and wounded, in their daily newspapers.
The Spanish Civil War brought together many of the issues these writers were obsessed with – war, working class solidarity, communism, the struggle against fascism. Many of the poets travelled to Spain – it became a mark of revolutionary virtue and commitment – most as journalists and commentators, a handful to actually fight. Several young English poets and critics actually died fighting on the Republican side – Christopher Caudwell, Julian Bell, John Cornford, Ralph Fox.
Madrid, like a live eye in the Iberian mask,
Asks help from heaven and receives a bomb:
Doom makes the night her eyelid, but at dawn
Drawn is the screen from the bull's-eye capital.
She gazes at Junker angels in the sky
Passionately and pitifully. Die
The death of a dog. O Capital City, still
Sirius shall spring up from the kill.
(from Elegy in Spain by George Barker, 1939)
By the end many had become bitterly disillusioned by the lies and betrayals they discovered on their own side, the anti-fascist side. George Orwell was only one of hundreds who realised that war, any war, isn't as simple and pure as their schoolboy heroics had imagined.
Skelton makes the point that for many of that generation, the Second World War came as an anti-climax after the immense emotional investment they'd made in Spain and the immense disappointment and disillusion they felt when all of Spain was finally conquered by Franco's fascists in early 1939, and the war declared over. All their fervour had been drained and soured. The mood which greeted the start of the Second World War was one of weary resignation.
Virtually all the poets came from the professional classes and attended exclusive private schools and were acutely embarrassed by it. They keenly identified with the workers, with the unemployed, with the poor, they wanted to take up their cause. They wanted to joint the workers gang but they didn't know how.
Edward Upward's novel In The Thirties amounts to a long description of the mortal self-consciousness and embarrassment a typical public school product feels when he becomes a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and finds himself having to talk to the Great Unwashed.
The fact of the poets' privilege tends to make most of their poems loudly proclaiming solidarity with the working class seem risible to us today. All too often the threats against 'the rich' and 'the idle' and 'the upper classes' and 'the poshocracy' amounted to little more than masochistic self-hatred, the result of liberal guilt about their own privileged upbringings, and a lot of the people they threatened were, on closer inspection, their mummies and daddies and uncles and aunts.
You dowagers with Roman noses
Sailing along between banks of roses
well dressed,
You lords who sit at committee tables
And crack with grooms in riding stables
your father's jest…
(opening of The Witnesses by Auden)
Orwell's hatred of this middle-class play-acting knew no bounds. In a letter he dismissed Auden and Spender in particular as 'parlour Bolsheviks'. Orwell himself, of course, went to Eton, but rather than swanning off to Oxford or Cambridge he went straight into the Colonial Police in Burma where he learned about imperialism first hand, about oppression, about guns and discipline in a way most of the frivolous poets never did.
The common people
That said, there was a new cultural and academic interest in the sociology of ordinary people, the common people, evidenced by, for example the Mass-Observation social research organisation founded in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrisson (Harrow, Cambridge), poet Charles Madge (Winchester, Cambridge) and film-maker Humphrey Jennings (the Perse school, Cambridge), or the amateur ethnography of George Orwell (Eton), namely Down and Out In Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.
In this spirit, many of the poets and many of their 30s poems tried to capture the lives of the common people without being (too) patronising.
Now the till and the typewriter call the fingers
The workman gathers his tools
For the eight-hour-day but after that the solace
Of films or football pools
Or of the gossip or cuddle, the moments of self-glory
Or self-indulgence, blinkers on the eyes of doubt,
The blue smoke rising and the brown lace sinking
In the empty glass of stout.
August for the people and their favourite islands.
Daily the steamers sidle up to meet
The effusive welcome of the pier, and soon
The luxuriant life of the steep stone valleys,
The sallow oval faces of the city
Begot in passion or good-natured habit,
Are caught by waiting coaches, or laid bare
Beside the undiscriminating sea.
(from To A Writer On His Birthday by W.H. Auden, 1935)
Traditional forms
The super-serious Modernism of the generation before the Thirties poets, of T.S. Eliot (born 1888) and Ezra Pound (born 1885) and their continental equivalents, which crystallised just before the First World War, had promoted free verse i.e. that each line of a poem should be free-standing and not constrained by having to fit into a preconceived stanza or rhyming scheme. In fact rhyme was generally dropped from Modernist poems as childish and Victorian.
But the Thirties poets rejected this rejection, and brought traditional forms and rhymes and rhyme schemes back into fashion. Partly they were reacting against their earnest forebears, partly it was in a political bid to make poetry more popular and accessible, partly because it's just lots of fun to write ballads or sestinas or terza rima or sonnets or couplets and so on.
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.
'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky…
(from As I Walked Out One Evening by W.H. Auden, 1939)
All the old forms were revived but given a modern spin, filled with thirties urban imagery or modern psychology. Louise MacNeice used rhyme schemes in his best poems but with subtle innovations to match the fleeting moods he sets out to capture.
Time was away and somewhere else,
There were two glasses and two chairs
And two people with the one pulse
(Somebody stopped the moving stairs):
Time was away and somewhere else…
(from Meeting Point by Louis MacNeice, 1939)
Later on Auden tended to divide his poetry into Poems and Songs and it is no accident that his younger contemporary at Gresham's public school, Benjamin Britten, throughout his career set many of Auden's lyrics to music, because they had solid form and rhyme schemes.
If there's one thing an expensive education at private school and then Oxford or Cambridge gives you it is the confidence to tell other people what to do. The classic Thirties poem is packed with accusations and exhortations and instructions and orders. It addresses people, directly, like a speech or sermon or assembly address by the head master.
One characteristic device was to address as 'you' a range of professions and jobs. It made it sound as if the poet a) grasped the multifarious nature of modern society, and b) had a huge audience across all professions and types.
But always the tone is warning, minatory, threatening, urgently telling these simple folks that the Disaster is coming, the Great Social Upheaval is just round the corner, they'd better bloody wake up before it's too late!
Fireman and farmer, father and flapper,
I'm speaking to you, sir, please drop that paper;
Don't you know it's poison, have you given up all hope?
Aren't you ashamed, ma'am, to be taking dope?
There's a nasty habit that starts in the head
And creeps through the veins till you go all dead:
Insured against accident? But that won't prove
Much use when one morning you find you can't move…
(Opening of The Magnetic Mountain poem 20)
The drums tap out sensational bulletins;
Frantic the efforts of the violins
To drown the song behind the guarded hill:
The dancers do not listen; but they will.
(To Benjamin Britten by W.H. Auden)
All this telling people what to do meant that, without realising it, many of the 1930s 'rebels' ended up sounding as high-minded and didactic and evangelical as the school chaplains and headmasters and gammon-faced imperialists they loved to mock.
This verbal tic, the direct address of the hypothetical reader, you you you, at first gives the poems a sense of vigour and confidence but after a while feels like someone is poking you in the chest with their forefinger.
You that love England, who have an ear for her music,
The slow movement of clouds in benediction,
Clear arias of light thrilling over her uplands,
Over the chords of summer sustained peacefully…
You who go out alone, on tandem or on pillion,
Down arterial roads riding in April,
Or sad besides lakes where hill-slopes are reflected
Making fires of leaves, your high hopes fallen…
You who like peace, good sticks, happy in a small way
Watching birds or playing cricket with schoolboys,
Who pay for drinks all round, whom disaster chose not…
This frequent use of the accusatory 'you' is accompanied by recurring use of the imperative mood, telling readers they must do, act, look, see, listen, consider, think about the important Truths the poet is telling them.
Think now about all the things that made up that place… (Geoffrey Grigson)
Enter the dreamhouse, brothers and sisters… (Cecil Day-Lewis)
Consider these, for we have condemned them… (Cecil Day-Lewis)
Consider this and in our time
As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman… (W.H. Auden)
Let the eye of the traveller consider this country and weep… (W.H. Auden)
For many of the 30s poets were not only the products of top public schools ('five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery', as Orwell described the experience), but then went back to become teachers in them, too, swearing to do it all differently, to be more enlightened and tolerant than their own masters, but ending up sounding dismayingly like them.
And a schoolmasterly, hectoring tone is regularly found across all their poems. Think now could be the visionary poet telling his readers to wake up to the international situation: or it could be the Head of Latin telling his dopey pupils to make sure their adjectives agree in number and in gender.
At the time they felt they were making vital distinctions between the previous generation and their own. Looking back, they all sound like part of the same big squabbling family.
Schoolboys
It is no accident that so much of this sounds like squabbling children. At the time and subsequently many of the writers realised their privileged private schooling had kept them away from the harsh realities of life as it was lived by 99% of the population and placed a steel wall between them and 'the working classes'.
Much of the poetry prolonged into adulthood a silly, giggling, schoolboy mentality, a jokey cliqueiness that those outside it (i.e. almost everyone) loathed, in particular, about the chummy insiderness of the Auden Gang. Allen Tate thought they were 'juvenile'. Orwell wrote a long essay about how much damage his prep school did him (Such Such were the joys, 1948), as did Cyril Connolly in the autobiographical section of Enemies of Promise (1938).
Auden himself (of course) nailed it in his birthday poem to his friend Isherwood, remembering how, as young men just out of Oxford:
Our hopes were set still on the spies' career,
Prizing the glasses and the old felt hat,
And all the secrets we discovered
Were extraordinary and false…
Ways of escape
Part of the reason for joining a gang, group or movement is because you don't have to face the world by yourself. Thus Stephen Spender looking back at his motivation for going to Spain says he was driven on:
'by a sense of personal and social guilt which made me feel firstly that I must take sides, secondly that I could purge myself of an abnormal individuality by co-operating with the workers' movement.'
Many of the writers were plagued by personal anxieties and neuroses, not least the king of them all, Auden himself, but many others were aware of this conflict between their own private anxieties and their wish to present a brave, heroic, communist front to the world. This double-mindedness, this self-consciousness, watching themselves think and feel, was a characteristic of the age.
And now I relapse to sleep, to dreams perhaps and reaction
Where I shall play the gangster or the sheikh,
Kill for the love of killing, make the world my sofa,
Unzip the women and insult the meek.
Which fantasies no doubt are due to my private history,
Matter for the analyst…
Auden's father was a doctor, in fact a professor of public health among other things. He owned a complete edition of Freud's works and young Wystan read them along with everything else he could get his hands on. Thus by the time he arrived at Oxford he was able confidently to psychoanalyse all his friends (before or after sleeping with them).
Most of all Auden had an ascendency over his friends which was due to his being versed in psychoanalysis and therefore in a position to diagnose their complexes… Auden… seemed a lone psychoanalyst at the centre of a group of inhibited, neurotic patients – us.'
( The Thirties and After by Stephen Spender, pp.19-20 )
Freud was one of the numerous modern thinkers whose ideas Auden played with in his poems like toys but then Freud's psychosexual theories influenced all the writers of the era. Indeed Freud is the subject of an extended and highly impressive obituary poem Auden wrote right at the end of the decade, in his magisterial, end-of-the-Thirties manner.
When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
when grief has been made so public, and exposed
to the critique of a whole epoch
the frailty of our conscience and anguish,
of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
among us, those who were doing us some good,
who knew it was never enough but
hoped to improve a little by living.
Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished
to think of our life from whose unruliness
so many plausible young futures
with threats or flattery ask obedience,
but his wish was denied him: he closed his eyes
upon that last picture, common to us all,
of problems like relatives gathered
puzzled and jealous about our dying.
For about him till the very end were still
those he had studied, the fauna of the night,
and shades that still waited to enter
the bright circle of his recognition
turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he
was taken away from his life interest
to go back to the earth in London,
an important Jew who died in exile…
(from In Memory of Sigmund Freud by W.H. Auden, 1940)
Freud seemed, to progressive thinkers, to have freed the new generation from its Victorian repressions. But Freud also had other uses than the strictly scientific or psychological.
The French group who invented Surrealism and automatic writing, who fetishised coincidences and the unconscious, took Freud as their inspiration and ideology. Although the movement had been founded in the 1920s the Surrealists made a big splash as a result of a famous exhibition held in Mayfair in 1936 which brought together the best of European Surrealist painting and was visited by record crowds and covered even in the popular press.
Elements of devil-may-care surrealist absurdity and irrelevance can be found in many of the Thirties poets and was a feature of Auden's ability to skip from image to image and his breezy invocation of fairy tales and nursery rhymes.
But whereas it was one device among many for Auden, a handful of writers devoted themselves more seriously to exploring the Surrealist mode, figures such as Hugh Sykes Davies (private school, Cambridge, Communist Party, Surrealism) and above all David Gascoyne (private school, Regents Street Poly, Communist Party, Surrealism). Their works sound like this:
today is the day when the streets are full of hearses
and when women cover their ring fingers with pieces of silk
when the doors fall off their hinges in ruined cathedrals
when hosts of white birds fly across the ocean from america
and make their nests in the trees of public gardens
the pavements of cities are covered with needles
the reservoirs are full of human hair
fumes of sulphur envelop the houses of ill-fame
out of which bloodred lilies appear.
across the square where crowds are dying in thousands
a man is walking a tightrope covered with moths
(from And the Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis by David Gascoyne, 1933)
Obscurity
Having made the point that many of the poets revived popular forms and rhyme schemes and so on, partly out of a wish to be better understood by the broadest possible audience, there's no denying that a lot of their poetry is, nonetheless, quite obscure.
More beautiful than any gift you gave
You were, a child so beautiful as to seem
To promise ruin what no child can have
or woman give…
From The Token by F.T. Prince
Not all the Thirties poets had the blunt factual subject matter to hand of John Cornford in his Spanish Civil War poems or were as crudely political and declamatory as Cecil Day-Lewis.
Many tried to express their feelings and emotions as poets always have done, but using the new styles and imagery of the age. The tortured syntax and stylistic quirks unleashed by Auden in his first collection, published in 1930 – the omission of the words 'the' or 'a'; use of 'O' as at the beginning of a prayer:
O for doors to be open and an invite with gilded edges
To dine with Lord Lobcock and Count Asthma on the platinum benches..
(from O for doors to be open by W.H. Auden, 1936)
And the vague wartime imagery of maps and leaders and ambushes – all these went on to infect an entire generation who, as a result, often found themselves caught in a mesh of sub-Audenesque mannerisms.
Lord O never let lose this habit
of expected strangeness, a kind
of alertness ambushed in the eye,
at once to strike on, to select
the deep the dangerous uniqueness down in things…
(from Request For The Day by Randall Swingler, 1933)
As a rule, the advice for coping with obscurity or anything you don't immediately understand in a poem is to go with the flow, read on past it, don't let it put you off, and come back later and try to work it out, like a crossword puzzle.
Sometimes things become clearer on reflection, sometimes they're deliberately obscure and only annotations or explanations by a scholar can help. Other times you can just let the obscurity settle in your mind – after all poetry is not a PowerPoint presentation with clear bullet points, it's meant to work its way into the mind through other channels.
Take Dylan Thomas: not many of his poems make much logical sense, but that doesn't stop them being magnificent.
But hang on…
So that is a thumbnail portrait of the classic style of Thirties poetry, as exemplified by the gang of Auden, Spender, MacNeice, Day-Lewis and their followers – highly political, highly confrontational, highly engaged. But the range and breadth of Skelton's anthology is meant to show us that there were lots of other 1930s, too.
Probably the most striking alternative to all of the above is the gentle, Anglican satire of John Betjeman, destined for a long career and the Poet Laureateship (1972). It is surprising to think of him as a 'thirties' poet, but he was.
In a completely different zone was the semi-surreal, religious trumpeting of Dylan Thomas, who didn't go to a spiffing public school (instead, Swansea Grammar School) and who stood outside literary London and its backbiting (though forced to work there during and after the war).
In a room of his own was the eccentric literary critic William Empson. I've always liked his poetry because it is larky.
I.e. it's easy to let too much focus on the Auden Gang and the obvious themes overshadow the diversity and variety of the poetry of the period.
Some poems from the thirties
Lullaby by W.H. Auden (1937)
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
In Westminster Abbey by John Betjeman (1940)
Let me take this other glove off
As the vox humana swells,
And the beauteous fields of Eden
Bask beneath the Abbey bells.
Here, where England's statesmen lie,
Listen to a lady's cry.
Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans,
Spare their women for Thy Sake,
And if that is not too easy
We will pardon Thy Mistake.
But, gracious Lord, whate'er shall be,
Don't let anyone bomb me.
Keep our Empire undismembered
Guide our Forces by Thy Hand,
Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,
Honduras and Togoland;
Protect them Lord in all their fights,
And, even more, protect the whites.
Think of what our Nation stands for,
Books from Boots' and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains.
Lord, put beneath Thy special care
One-eighty-nine Cadogan Square.
Although dear Lord I am a sinner,
I have done no major crime;
Now I'll come to Evening Service
Whensoever I have the time.
So, Lord, reserve for me a crown,
And do not let my shares go down.
I will labour for Thy Kingdom,
Help our lads to win the war,
Send white feathers to the cowards
Join the Women's Army Corps,
Then wash the steps around Thy Throne
In the Eternal Safety Zone.
Now I feel a little better,
What a treat to hear Thy Word,
Where the bones of leading statesmen
Have so often been interr'd.
And now, dear Lord, I cannot wait
Because I have a luncheon date.
Two Armies by Stephen Spender (1939)
As you know I don't much like Stephen Spender's verse. I think it's a good impersonation of poetry but it's not the real thing. Here he is trying to write a poem about the Spanish Civil War because it's expected of him.
Deep in the winter plain, two armies
Dig their machinery, to destroy each other.
Men freeze and hunger. No one is given leave
On either side, except the dead, and wounded.
These have their leave; while new battalions wait
On time at last to bring them violent peace.
All have become so nervous and so cold
That each man hates the cause and distant words
Which brought him here, more terribly than bullets.
Once a boy hummed a popular marching song,
Once a novice hand flapped the salute;
The voice was choked, the lifted hand fell,
Shot through the wrist by those of his own side…
Compare and contrast Spender trying to write a poem with this poem included in a letter home from the front by John Cornford, who fought in Spain, serving with the POUM militia on the Aragon front.
A Letter from Aragon by John Cornford (1936)
This is a quiet sector of a quiet front.
We buried Ruiz in a new pine coffin,
But the shroud was too small and his washed feet stuck out.
The stink of his corpse came through the clean pine boards
And some of the bearers wrapped handkerchiefs round their faces.
Death was not dignified.
We hacked a ragged grave in the unfriendly earth
And fired a ragged volley over the grave.
You could tell from our listlessness, no one much missed him.
There is no poison gas and no H. E.
But when they shelled the other end of the village
And the streets were choked with dust
Women came screaming out of the crumbling houses,
Clutched under one arm the naked rump of an infant.
I thought: how ugly fear is.
Our nerves are steady; we all sleep soundly.
In the clean hospital bed, my eyes were so heavy
Sleep easily blotted out one ugly picture,
A wounded militiaman moaning on a stretcher,
Now out of danger, but still crying for water,
Strong against death, but unprepared for such pain.
This on a quiet front.
But when I shook hands to leave, an Anarchist worker
Said: 'Tell the workers of England
This was a war not of our own making
We did not seek it.
But if ever the Fascists again rule Barcelona
It will be as a heap of ruins with us workers beneath it.'
Spender is very earnest but he's posing, he's playing the part of young lyric poet, he knows he is the Percy Bysshe Shelley of the Movement. But Cornford isn't playing.
Missing Dates by William Empson (1940)
Empson earned his living as an English professor and critic. He wrote a small number of odd poems. This is the most famous. Read each line slowly.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
It is not your system or clear sight that mills
Down small to the consequence a life requires;
They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills
Of young dog blood gave but a month's desires.
It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills
Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires.
Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.
The complete fire is death. From partial fires
It is the poems you have lost, the ills
From missing dates, at which the heart expires.
The Sunlight on the Garden by Louis MacNeice (1938)
An example of MacNeice's deceptively simple lyricism and lulling, cradle rhythms.
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.
Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.
The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying
And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.
And death shall have no dominion by Dylan Thomas (1936)
The great clanging cathedral bell of Thomas's stern verse.
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
The poets included in this book
Kenneth Allot b.1912
W.H. Auden b.1907
George Barker b.1913
Julian Bell b.1908
John Betjeman b.1906
Ronald Bottral b.1906
Norman Cameron b.1905
Christopher Caudwell b.1907
John Cornford bb.1915
Hugh Sykes Davies b.1909
Clifford Dyment b.1914
William Empson b.1906
Gavin Ewart b.1915
Edgar Foxall b.1906
Roy Fuller b.1912
David Gascoyne b.1916
Geoffrey Grigson b.1905
Bernard Gutteridge b.1916
Robert Hamer b.1916
Rayner Heppenstall b.1911
Peter Hewitt b.1914
Kaurie Lee b.1914
John Lehmann b.1907
Cecil Day-Lewis b.1904
Louis Macneice b.1907
Charles Madge b.1912
H.B. Mallalieu b.1914
Philip O'Connor b.1916
Clere Parsons b.1908
Geoffrey Parsons b.1910
F.T. Price b.1912
John Pudney b.1909
Henry Reed b.1914
Anne Ridler b.1912
Michael Roberts b.1902
Roger Roughton b.1916
Francis Scarfe b.1911
John Short b.1911
Bernard Spencer b.1909
Stephen Spender b.1909
Randall Swingler b.1909
Julian Symons b.1912
Dylan Thomas b.1914
Ruthven Todd b.1914
Rex Warner b.1905
Vernon Watkins b.1906
The Auden Generation
The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse edited by Valentine Cunningham
The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics People 1933-75 by Stephen Spender (1978)
Posted in Literature, Poetry, War
Tagged 1926 General Strike, 1929 Wall Street Crash, And the Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis, Art Deco, Auden Group, Autumn Journal, Cecil Day-Lewis, Charles Madge, Christopher Caudwell, Clere Parsons, Communism, Communist Party of Great Britain, Cyril Connolly, David Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, Edward Upward, Enemies of Promise, Eton, F.T. Price, Forward from Liberalism, Freud, George Orwell, Great Depression, Great War, Hitler, Hugh Sykes Davies, Humphrey Jennings, John Betjeman, John Cornford, Journey to the Border, Julian Bell, Laurie Lee, Lay your sleeping head my love, Marx, Marxism, New Verse, On the Frontier, Philip O'Connor, poetry, Politics, poshocracy, POUM, public school, Revolution in Writing, Robin Skelton, Roger Roughton, Ronald Bottral, Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills, Spanish Civil War, Stephen Spender, Such Such were the joys, Surrealism, The Daily Worker, The Magnetic Mountain, The sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold, the Thirties, Tom Harrisson, verse, W.H. Auden, war, William Empson
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/06/01/poetry-of-the-thirties-robin-skelton/
Austerity Britain: A World to Build 1945–48 by David Kynaston (2007)
David Kynaston (b.1951) has written about 16 history books on broadly three topics: cricket, the City of London, and Britain after the Second World War. His post-war histories (to date; the plan is to take them up to 1979) have been published as three volumes, each of which – rather confusingly – contains two 'books':
Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (2007) containing:
A World to Build, 1945–48
Smoke in the Valley, 1948–51
Family Britain, 1951–57 (2009) containing:
The Certainties of Place, 1951-5
A Thicker Cut, 1955-57
Modernity Britain, 1957–62 (2014) containing:
Opening the Box, 1957–59
A Shake of the Dice, 1959–62
Should one review the portmanteau volume – Austerity Britain (692 pages long in its current Bloomsbury paperback edition) – or the two 'books' it contains? I've chosen the latter option, because each of the 'books' is so dense and packed with information that they require separate posts.
What makes the books so delightful and addictive is that they are an oral history. Rather than the stats and graphs of an economic history, or the acts and votes of a political history, or the treaties and negotiations of a diplomatic history, Kynaston's account quotes at length from diaries, letters, journals and accounts kept by the widest range of people alive during the period, as they react to events large and small, national, international and parochial.
Fairly regularly he stops to consider this or that 'issue' – rationing, nationalisation, town planning – in what you might call the traditional historical way, describing key publications or speeches in that area. But then he swiftly returns to the more gossipy main stream of his approach, to quote housewives, workers, local officials.
The result is to be led through the key events and debates of the period, but to see it overwhelmingly in human terms, in the words of the people who shed and led debate but also the reactions of the ordinary man and woman in the street.
Some of the voices
The Famous
Neil Kinnock, future leader of the Labour Party, aged 3 when the war ends in 1945
Patrick Stewart, 5, moved along by a policeman for singing outside a polling booth in 1945
Bill Wyman, bassist with the Rolling Stones, starts grammar school, 8
Glenda Jackson, aged 9 when the war ends, starts grammar school in 1947
Alan Bennett, 11, spent VE Day in Guildford
Kenneth Tynan, drama critic to be, now Birmingham schoolboy, 18
Humphrey Lyttleton, 24
ultra-royalist James Lees-Milne, diarist, architectural historian, worked for the National Trust, 36
Cyril Connolly, editor of Horizon literary magazine, 41
Noel Coward, playwright, aged 45
J.B. Priestley, novelist and radio broadcaster, 50
J.R.R. Tolkien, 53, commenting on the insanity of the atom bomb
Harold Nicholson, British diplomat, author, diarist and politician, 58
Violet Bonham Carter, Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury, politician and diarist, 58
There are hundreds more but this gives a flavour. Kinnock is quoted as remembering the prefab house his parents moved into. Bill Wyman remembers how going to grammar school in 1947 cut him off from his working class roots, though the boys at his new school teased him for being poor. Lees-Milne is very posh and quoted liberally throughout with his generally negative reactions to the Labour government.
Connolly, as a magazine editor and essayist, wrote reams of material, but Kynaston quotes him, fascinatingly, commenting on the way the great wall of left-wing / communist solidarity among artists, writers, poets and so on during the 1930s simply evaporated after the war and had quite disappeared by 1947. The problem was that they finally had a 'socialist' government and there wasn't a man or woman in 'the movement' who wasn't bitterly disappointed at the reality (p.235). The same sentiment is expressed by George Orwell, who in his long essay, The Lion and the Unicorn (1942), wrote confidently about the general public's swing to the Left and the notion of central planning but, by 1946, had become disillusioned (pp.45, 173).
All this was exacerbated by the Berlin Airlift, the coup in Czechoslovakia, and the general start of the Cold War. I hadn't realised that this led to actual legislation banning car carrying communists from public office, with the ruin of many a career.
There are also extensive quotes from key players in politics, from the diaries or letters or speeches of men like Clement Attlee (Labour Prime Minister), Hugh Gaitskell (Minister of Fuel and Power), Aneurin Bevan (Minister of Health overseeing the creation of the National Health Service), Ernest Bevin (Foreign Secretary who oversaw the independence of India, Israel etc), Herbert Morrison (Deputy Prime Minister), Stafford Cripps (Chancellor of the Exchequer).
Slowly you get a feel for their personalities, achievements and disagreements. Around them swim all kinds of minor figures, private secretaries, and MPs, and policy makers such as Michael Young, who wrote Labour's 1945 manifesto (Let Us Face The Future), coined the term meritocracy and went on to play a key role in setting up the Consumer Association and the Open University.
The Obscure
Kynaston takes his lead from Mass Observation, set up in 1937 by three Cambridge graduates, anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet Charles Madge and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings. Mass Observation aimed to:
record everyday life in Britain through a panel of around 500 untrained volunteer observers who either maintained diaries or replied to open-ended questionnaires (known as directives). They also paid investigators to anonymously record people's conversation and behaviour at work, on the street and at various public occasions including public meetings and sporting and religious events. (Wikipedia)
Kynaston relies heavily on material from the M-O archive now held at the University of Sussex. This takes many forms. M-O carried out tailored surveys on specific issues throwing up statistical results of the numbers in favour or against particular policies. Their contributors often reported on conversations overheard on the street, on the buses or tube, at the theatre etc. And other contributors kept detailed diaries. The most famous of these was Nella Last (1889-1968), who wrote over two million words about everything she died, heard and observed, from 1939 to 1966, making her one of the single largest contributors to M-O.
But Kynaston quotes from a large number of other diarists and recorders, including:
Michael Burns, grew up in Tolworth
Lawrence Daly, coalminer
Alice 'Judy' Haines, a young married mother of two living in Chingford
Anthony Heap, a middle-aged local government officer from St Pancras
Mary King, retired teacher
Gladys Langford, deserted by her husband, living alone in the Woodstock Hotel
Ernest Loftus, headmaster of Barking Abbey School
Edith Palmer, ex-pat's daughter, late-20s, arriving in England from Kenya
Mrs Michael Pleydell-Bouverie who spent three years on behalf of the Daily Mail speaking to 'the Women of Britain' about homes and housing
Kenneth Preston, a middle-aged English teacher at Keighley Grammar School
Marian Raynham, a housewife from Surbiton
Henry St John, son of a sweetshop owner, living in Bristol
Sir Raymond Streat, head of the Cotton Board
Rose Uttin, housewife from Wembley
Mrs Madge Waller
Post-war issues
So what do these people comment on and discuss? A huge array of issues and problems which faced Britain right from the moment war ended (Victory in Europe 8 May 1945, Victory in Japan and the final end of the war, 15 August). As stated, Kynaston is not a conventional historian of diplomacy or economics. Issues appear insofar as they impinged on the minds of his huge cast of Britons. None of them are pursued in detail and, after 300 pages, I realised that he rarely comes to a conclusion about any of them. Instead we are presented with a variety of opinions, from top politicians and expert down to housewives and coalminers – and then he moves on.
The General Election 5 July 1945
The Labour government's attempts to:
nationalise industry
set up a National Health Service (launched, after much struggles with the doctors, on 5 July 1948)
The housing crisis
Education (everyone accepted the 11-plus, the division between grammar and technical schools, and nobody touched the public schools which were [and are], according to Kynaston, 'the single most important source of political, social and economic privilege', p.153)
Surrender of Germany, suicide of Hitler
Atom bombs dropped on Japan
Berlin Blockade and airlift
June 1947 Marshall Plan
February 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia
But most of the people Kynaston quotes have little or no interest in international affairs. After initial relief that the war is over, and then shock at the revelation of the atom bomb, most people sink back into their customary indifference to international affairs (and to politics generally).
Britain might as well not have an empire at all. The independence of Israel and India/Pakistan are not mentioned. Decades ago I read the comment by the Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James, that the tragedy of the British was that all their history took place abroad – by which he meant in the empire.
One of the biggest aspects of the book is the way the British Empire is almost completely absent from it. The people Kynaston quotes are struggling to make ends meet, to find somewhere to live, find a job, and then find food to eat. He quotes a survey of 2,000 adults made in 1948 which revealed that only 49% could name a single British colony. The majority of those surveyed could not name a single British colony.
And so, since so few people knew or cared about the empire, Kynaston devotes much space to popular radio programmes (Woman's Hour, first broadcast on 7 October 1946 on the BBC's Light Programme, the popular comedy It's That Man Again), to the very slow spread of television (only 50,000 sets in 1945). There is more about the Grand National than there is about Gandhi, more about Stanley Matthews (the footballer) than Stalin.
In this book nobody travels abroad (nobody can afford it) but plenty of people have a summer holiday at Margate or Morecambe or at Billy Butlin's new holiday camps (first one at Skegness in 1936).
Kynaston gives us the results of the key test matches and FA Cup Finals for 1945, 46, and 47, as well as the Epsom Derby, and reports from greyhound races and boxing matches – while all kinds of high-minded middle-class commentators lament that the average working man seems more interested in a pint, a packet of fags and the sports results than he does about the Iron Curtain.
The intellectuals and the masses
This reflects what, for me, is the main impression of the book, which is the enormous divide between the relatively small educated liberal intelligentsia – the policy makers and politicians and thinkers and writers and architects and planners – and the vast majority of the population, still very working class, often illiterate or, as Kynaston puts it:
the profound cultural mismatch between progressive activators and the millions acted upon (p.267)
Kynaston shows how all of the 1945 Labour government's policies were not just controversial but opposed by large number of people, even the working people the Labour Party claimed to represent. For example, efforts to pass laws guaranteeing the trade unions representatives on boards of the new nationalised industries (a policy followed in Germany) were rejected by the unions. Why? Because they preferred to negotiate wages from a position of freedom and strength (p.229) It was a mindset which, arguably, crippled British industry for generations.
Similarly, it is fascinating to read how many ordinary people (not just the usual suspects, Tory MPs and toff writers), really hard core working class people, were suspicious of, or actively against, the welfare state, the new system of national insurance and the National Health Service.
The gaping chasm between well-meaning left-leaning university-educated intellectuals and 'the masses' is probably best demonstrated in the area of housing. Vast amounts of Britain's housing stock was destroyed by German bombing. But a fair percentage of what survived was desperately rundown slums, particularly in the industrial cities – London's East End, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and so on contained acres of slums, houses with no running water, gas or electricity, millions of people living with no indoor toilet.
The chasm comes about when the planners and architects put their heads together to solve the problem. There was debate and argument at all levels, but roughly speaking, people wanted houses with a little garden of their own, and the planners wanted to put them in blocks of flats. People wanted their bombed out city centres to be restored to how they were before the war. Urban planners and go-ahead young architects wanted, on the contrary, to demolish what old buildings were left, and create sweeping new town centres, dominated by pedestrian precincts and car parks, surrounded by ring roads. As he writes of the brave new plan devised to demolish and rebuild central Plymouth:
There was little or no local consultation, with all objections overruled. (p.36)
The opening of the book is devoted to arguments about how to rebuild Britain and, through the thicket of specific details about new schemes for Plymouth or Hull, one gets a really clear feel for the divide between those who know best what the people want, and the people themselves – not least, of course, because Kynaston's whole book is devoted to the people's voices. He quotes one of the founders of Mass Observation, Tom Harrison:
worried most by the way that planners and others associated with the matter talked as if they were winning over the general public when they were only winning over each other. He had never met any group of people who 'scratched each other's backs' more than planners did. (p.47)
In Bristol the local retail association organised a poll which showed that only 400 were in favour of the new Broadmead shopping centre, while 13,000 opposed it. The planners ignored this and all other opposition, and went ahead and built it.
This Great Divide, this sense of a mass population profoundly alienated from their lords and masters, grows as the book progresses from the May 1945 General Election through to its end point, 5 July 1948, the day the National Health Service was inaugurated. Intellectuals at the time were agonisingly aware of it. Various papers and reports guesstimated that 'the thinking minority' ranged from 20% down to a mere 5% of the population (p.55). How could they break out of their bubble to really engage with the great unwashed (an expression coined around 1830 by the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton)?
Maybe the single biggest surprise is the couple of pages devoted to the four months spent by American actor, Ronald Reagan at Elstree Studios making a war movie called The Hasty Heart (pp.314-315). Reagan was appalled by the filthy London smogs and rundown hotels, and – although he went out of his way to praise the director and all the other technicians he worked with – it was a grim first-hand sight of socialism in action which, in his view, amounted to stoppages dictated by the militant trade unions, six-hour queues at hospitals, gaunt impoverished passersby and mile after mile of slate-roofed council houses in the rain.
So far so anecdotal: but Kynaston goes on to say that Reagan himself, writing twenty years later in the 1970s, pointed to this trip to Britain – to seeing the 'natural' economic order of free markets replaced by rationing and state interference at every level, and the resulting lack of all basic facilities in a culture dominated by the petty tyrannies of trade union shop stewards and local government officials – as a defining moment in his journey to the Right.
So that, considering Reagan's centrality to world politics during the 1980s and the role he played in the collapse of the Soviet Union, of communism, and even of full-blooded socialism as a viable political programme, there's a case for saying that these few months in rainy Hertfordshire changed the history of the world.
General impoverishment
Kynaston devotes pages to political debates about Marshall Aid, about the end of Lend-Lease, about the currency crisis and devaluation of sterling, and so on.
But by far the biggest and most enduring subject of the book is RATIONING, the rationing of food and clothing, which not only continued after the war, but got worse, a lot worse. From the poshest in the land down to a variety of housewives, Kynaston's quotes convey the sheer numbing crushing effect of days and months and year after year of shortages of meat, bacon, milk, sugar, butter, even of bread.
Demobbed soldiers, or visitors from abroad (including the American playwright Tennessee Williams), or British children arriving in Britain back from the colonies (Cliff Richard arriving from India in 1948, aged 8) all noticed how pale and underfed the population looked. For years after the war the gas supply was weak and the electricity was turned off at certain times of day. Witnesses like Harold Nicholson testify that even in the best London clubs, the food came in minuscule portions and was barely edible.
And then in February 1948 the population was afflicted by the coldest winter of the 20th century. Young Roy Hattersley remembers sledging down the middle of usually busy streets (p.199) but thousands of the elderly and the infirm died. And millions had to dig a path from their back doors to their outside toilets.
There are thousands of wonderful anecdotes, gems and insights throughout the book – but the predominating image is of impoverishment and endurance.
The queue for rationed food – symbol of post-war Britain
P.S. Obscure novelists
A lot of the people Kynaston quotes are, inevitably, writers, a self-selecting cohort since he is himself a writer dealing with written records which 'writers' dominate.
Your ears prick up at the famous ones (Graham Greene, Noel Coward, Doris Lessing) but he also introduces us to a cocktail party of less well-known writers from the period, a list which has the effect o making you realise how selective 'literary history' is, picking out the half dozen 'serious' writers from each era or decade, and letting plenty of other authors drop into obscurity.
It is one of the many many pleasures of the book to come across forgotten authors he mentions, and google them and toy with tracking down and reading their (mostly forgotten) works:
Ruby Mildred Ayres b.1881 – one of the most popular and prolific romantic novelists of the twentieth century
Ethel M. Dell b.1881 – author of over 30 popular romance novels
Naomi Jacob b.1884 – author and actress
Ivy Compton-Burnett b.1884 – novelist
Angela Thirkell b.1890 – author of a series of 19 novels set in Home Counties 'Barsetshire'
James Lansdale Hodson b.1891 – journalist and novelist
Sylvia Townsend Warner b.1893 – novelist and poet
Elizabeth Bowen b.1899 – Irish novelist and short story writer
Mollie Panter-Downes b.1906 – novelist and writer of Letters from England for the New Yorker magazine
Pamela Hansford Johnson, Baroness Snow b.1912 – novelist, playwright, poet, literary and social critic
Denton Welch b.1915 – writer and painter
Sid Chaplin b.1916 coal miner who wrote novels about mining communities in the North-East
Joan Wyndham b.1921 – rose to literary prominence late in life through the diaries she had kept about her romantic adventures during the Second World War
Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 on Amazon
Tagged 11-plus, 1945–48, 1945–51, 2007, A World to Build, Alan Bennett, Aneurin Bevan, Angela Thirkell, Anthony Heap, atom bomb, Austerity, Austerity Britain, BBC, Berlin Airlift, Berlin Blockade, Bill Wyman, Birmingham, Butlin's, C.L.R. James, Charles Madge, Clement Attlee, Cliff Richard, Cold War, Communism, Consumer Association, Cyril Connolly, Czechoslovakia, David Kynaston, Denton Welch, diaries, Doris Lessing, Elizabeth Bowen, Elstree Studios, Ernest Bevin, Ernest Loftus, Ethel M. Dell, FA Cup Final, George Orwell, Gladys Langford, Glasgow, Glenda Jackson, Graham Greene, grammar school, Harold Nicholson, Henry St John, Herbert Morrison, history, Hitler, Horizon, Hugh Gaitskell, Humphrey Jennings, Humphrey Lyttleton, India, It's That Man Again, Ivy Compton-Burnett, J.B. Priestley, J.R.R. Tolkien, James Lansdale Hodson, James Lees-Milne, Joan Wyndham, journals, Judy Haines, Kenneth Preston, Kenneth Tynan, Labour Party, letters, Light Programme, London, Manchester, Marian Raynham, Marshall Plan, meritocracy, Michael Young, Mollie Panter-Downes, Naomi Jacob, National Health Service, Neil Kinnock, Nella Last, Noel Coward, Open University, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Patrick Stewart, Plymouth, Politics, post-war, Rolling Stones, Ronald Reagan, Rose Uttin, Roy Hattersley, Ruby Mildred Ayres, Second World War, Sid Chaplin, Sir Raymond Streat, slums, social history, Stafford Cripps, Stalin, Stanley Matthews, Sylvia Townsend Warner, television, Tennessee Williams, The Lion and the Unicorn, Tom Harrisson, trade unions, Victory in Europe, Victory in Japan, Violet Bonham Carter, Woman's Hour
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/01/25/austerity-britain-a-world-to-build-1945-48-david-kynaston/