No-one portrays Waugh better than Waugh

So it was time to be back on the Waugh path after a break following consecutive reading of the first seven novels (in between, I took my time to get through A L Kennedy's Serious Sweet, which was rewarding; more on that anon). I started with a rather unsatisfying biography by Philip Eade. It's entertaining enough, if not the racy read reviews claim, on the early years in a newly-developed Hampstead (a reminder that all suburbia was a building site once). Where I get stuck is in the endless focus on unrequited (or unwanted) romances with women after the early gay phase. The letters quoted on this subject are surprisingly dull, especially when they supplant much-needed detail on trips abroad. There comes a point where you actively dislike the man: his famous rudeness, his snobbery and cultivation of the aristocracy, the conservatism which seems so at odds with the often anarchic fantasy of the novels.

Towards the end it gets interesting again as the gulf between seeming and being opens up, and Waugh writes his most autobiographical novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, written in 1956/7 about a spell of madness four years earlier. I turned to that immediately, fascinated by what Eade cites as its exact reproduction of what happened to drugged-up Waugh on a disastrous sea journey. This is no mixture of fact and fiction, from what I understand of the correspondences between reality and the creation of 'Pinfold', a 50-year-old novelist at an odd juncture in his life. In fact Waugh himself confirms the exactness in a 1960 BBC Face to Face interview: the specific three minutes are to be found here and the full interview here.

The first chapter and a half ('Portrait of the artist in middle-age' and the start of 'Collapse of Elderly Party') features some of the most precisely-penned and unsparing self-revelation I've ever come across from a creative artist. The infuriating and yet often endearing codger that emerges from Eade's biography is ruthlessly and amusingly exposed:

His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz - everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime*. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. There was a phrase in the thirties: 'It is later than you think', which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was never later than Mr Pinfold thought. At intervals during the day night he would look at his watch and learn with disappointment how little of his life was past, how much there was still ahead of him. He wished no one ill, but he looked at the world sub specie aeternitatis and he found it flat as a map; except when, rather often, personal annoyance intruded. Then he would come tumbling from his exalted point of observation. Shocked by a bad bottle of wine, an impertinent stranger, or a fault in syntax, his mind like a cinema camera trucked furiously forward to confront the offending object close-up with glaring lens; with the eyes of a drill sergeant inspecting an awkward squad, bulging with wrath that was half-facetious, and with half-simulated incredulity; like a drill sergeant he was absurd to many but to some rather formidable.

Once upon a time all this had been thought diverting, People quoted his pungent judgments and invented anecdotes of his audacity, which were recounted as 'typical Pinfolds', Now, he realized his singularity had lost some of its attraction for others, but he was too old a dog to learn new tricks.

What follows, by way of narrative, is rather odd and occasionally a bit tedious: just as dreams often seem interesting only to the subject, the hallucinations Pinfold/Waugh experiences/experienced on the ship bound for India are only fitfully gripping and not often funny, though they do throw light on his persecution mania and his fear that people see him as an old poof, a snob, a coward (Waugh was not the third, at least). The steering back to 'normality' is beautifully done, as is the brief portrait of his calm and sensible wife. A one-off, and Nicholas Lezard makes further fine observations in his Guardian review here.

Made me think of a similarly divided Englishman, Elgar, and the gulf between his squirearchical persona as another middle-class chap aspiring to be a nob and the turbulence of his symphonic music (the first and third movements of his Second Symphony and the symphonic poem Falstaff are perhaps the equivalent of Waugh's Pinfold madness).

*In above-linked review, it's interesting to learn that Waugh thought a Francis Bacon painting would be the best cover illustration for the novel.

On the Waugh path

As reported here in April, the excellent recent TV adaptation of Decline and Fall turned me back to the novels of Evelyn Waugh. At university, I guess many of us brushed aside his first and its successor, Vile Bodies, as trivial if amusing; now I appreciate that there's seriousness of intent underneath, and a melancholy, vanitas vanitatum streak which peaks in the least typical of the books up to 1945, Brideshead Revisited.

That was perhaps the only slight disappointment: if you come to love the air of detachment and irony with which the novelist views his characters in all Brideshead's predecessors, the purple-prose nostalgia of the narrator, Charles Ryder, can be a little hard to take. Are we supposed to sympathise with him? I increasingly don't.

The main problem for me is how he virtually banishes the seemingly hopeless case that is his increasingly inebriated friend and (one presumes) youthful lover Sebastian and replaces him with his (Sebastian's) sister Diana. It's all summed up in a couple of remarks, viz:

'It's frightening,' Julia once said, 'to think how completely you have forgotten Sebastian.'

'He was the forerunner.'

'That's what you said in the storm, I've thought since perhaps I am only a forerunner too.'

There's certainly a symmetry in the two loves for brother and sister, but the growing interference of Catholicism can be distasteful - maybe that's the point - and the 'grace' at the end doesn't work for me. Waugh made it clear in a Preface written in 1959, and included in the old Penguin edition, that in 1943-4 he was 'gluttonous' during that time of privations 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'. But if I don't like Charles, I imagine I wouldn't like Waugh much either.

At any rate his other heroes and anti-heroes are more tantalising because so many, like Paul Pennyfeather, William Boot in Scoop - the phenomenon of the ill-equipped war correspondent is still very much with us - and certainly Tony Last in A Handful of Dust, are shadows. To summarise a famous passage in Decline and Fall, the 'mysterious disappearance' - or maybe the total absence - of their real personalities is the subject of those novels (Brenda Last is a melancholy shadow, too; you can't quite hate her until the end). Then there's the amoral Basil Seal of the dodgy but sharply observed Black Mischief, whose exploits as the superficial shine of the earlier novels vanishes with the onset of the Second World War in Put Out More Flags are laugh-out-loud territory (his escapades with the awful evacuee children in the English countryside, cheap comedy material to be sure, but it works).

I'm glad I read or re-read the first seven novels more or less in sequence, and within a couple of months, because they do mark the passing of the brittle Twenties in the eyes of one who lived through them. And the tangential reappearances of various characters must have given Anthony Powell the cue for his A Dance to the Music of Time series, which I devoured at university - so no snobbery about light comedy in that case, then - and which I don't know if I would admire so much now (but then that impression may have been muddled by the far-too-short TV adaptation). Now it's time for a Waugh armistice; then I may re-read the famous trilogy. Certainly I must go back to the diaries which I also loved so much as a teenager. But now for something completely different.

Three resurrections

Two are the semi-comic ones of Captain Grimes and Paul Pennyfeather, or so Evelyn Waugh similarly titles them as chapter-headings in Decline and Fall. To describe the form they take would spoil the pleasure of the absurd plot, if you haven't read the book or watched the new BBC three-parter. I do remember at university wondering why on earth we were studying such pieces of fluff as this and Vile Bodies, but the serialisation reinforced that the dialogue is so crisp, sharp and laugh-out-loud funny.

All credit to the director and cast for making it consistently so on the screen. I think lad-comedian Jack Whitehall surprised everyone with his pitch-perfect Paul, and though I saw other performances traduced for being too broad-brushstroke, that's surely how Waugh paints them. The main thing, again, is that I laughed a lot at Douglas Hodge's unsquashable Grimes, David Suchet's Dr Fagan ('it do, it do' being one of the funniest rejoinders in the whole thing - you need the context), Stephen Graham's Philbrick and sundry minor caricatures. I warmly agree with every word of Mark Sanderson's review on The Arts Desk. I could ask no more of it than the fact that I've gone back to my old Penguin copy (pictured up top), and who knows, I might continue with a Waugh binge.

'The' resurrection, about which I feel a little like Philip Pullman in The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, is a bit of a sticking point. Can we just take it as a metaphor or a parable, as Rupert Shortt suggests in his otherwise unproblematic (for me) God is No Thing? Perhaps, at least on Easter Day, when we need a 'triumphant' shout after the suffering of the Passion. Anyway, it allows me to put up one more detail from the glorious Vyšší Brod Brod altarpiece, and this superb minimalistic finale of Rachmaninov's Suite No. 1 for two pianos, eventually matching the bellsong of the happy morn with the same 'Christ is Risen' chant Rimsky-Korsakov uses in his Russian Easter Festival Orchestra. Forgive the poor picture, but the sound and performance of Lilya Zilberstein and Martha Argerich are terrific here.

In the meantime, I leave you with a somewhat sacrilegious Easter greeting - either message may be adopted - which has been widely circulated by us from home today.