The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (27 page)

“The written word obsessed Waugh,” Martin Stannard notes in his biography, “and in this he lived entirely. Words on paper were to him almost tactile, malleable, subject to control. He thought in words, in perfect sentences.” A young American scholar who visited him in his country residence retained a vivid memory of an inscription which he found in the bathroom affixed upon the cistern of the toilet; handwritten and initialled E.W., the notice provided instructions on how to operate the toilet’s faulty flush:

One feels as if the exquisite precision of the wording was designed to overcome the chaos and the rebelliousness of brute things. Waugh would have fully appreciated the famous anecdote from the life of a great Chinese calligrapher: as a ferocious tiger was terrorising a certain corner of the country, at the request of the local population, the calligrapher wrote a large inscription:
TIGERS NOT WELCOME
. The sheer magnificence of his calligraphy had such
authority
that the beast relented and left the district.

“Literature is simply the appropriate use of language”—Waugh made this striking and characteristic statement in a letter to Ann Fleming at the very end of his career. It sums up neatly his aesthetic principles, but should not be misconstrued as some sort of formalist manifesto. On the contrary, for him “the appropriate use of language both implied and guaranteed the proper functioning of a right mind.” Aesthetics is a form of ethics, as he made clear in his rebuke of John Mortimer’s views: “‘Many writers [Mortimer says] are not very good at anything except writing, and the value of their work is often not to be judged by the quality of their thoughts.’ But writing is the expression of thought. There is no abstract writing. All literature implies moral standards and criticisms.”

On a superficial level, Waugh’s views may seem contradictory: on the one hand, he multiplies statements such as “I have no psychological interest . . . I regard writing not as an investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed”—and, on the other hand, he emphatically rejects the possibility of a form of “abstract writing.” Stannard finely analyses the deeper coherence of his attitude: “At the root of Waugh’s pronouncements, there is something much simpler and, at the same time, infinitely more complex: the terror of Babel. One thing alone, in Waugh’s view, kept men sane: the sense of unified, agreed meaning. Ultimately this ‘meaning’ was God. In temporal terms, it was language. The post-structuralist notions of the (almost) infinite plurality of meaning would have been
anathema to him: that way lay Picasso and
Finnegans Wake
. . . Waugh looked on his books as independent systems of order in a nightmare existence.” In this sense, the order of words established by the writer’s pen would keep madness at bay, as the Chinese calligrapher’s brush could chase tigers away.

Waugh would certainly have subscribed to Samuel Johnson’s moving utterance: “Of the uncertainties of our present state, the most dreadful and alarming is the uncertain continuance of reason.” The fear of incipient lunacy seems to have haunted him recurrently. On a creative level, a more benign form of his “madness” expressed itself as an ability to turn all reality into private fantasy. As a protective device against the bruising contact of life, he was determined to see events and people as a fiction from which he was separate. (In this sense, of course, there may be an element of mild schizophrenia at the source of all creative writing—after all, art is a desperate attempt to make a cruel reality a little less intolerable.) Without detracting in the least from Waugh’s well-known courage, one may even wonder to what extent his fearlessness in front of all sorts of dangers (during the war, for instance, he constantly displayed a bravery that bordered at times on downright recklessness) was not also rooted in his imaginative powers and in his capability to cut himself off from reality in order to become a detached spectator of his own predicament. The same mechanisms of imagination which produce feelings of panic, can also—if guided by a forceful will—generate courage.

In everyday life, Waugh was constantly casting acquaintances and friends into fantastic roles, and generally turning the people he met into characters in a private charade; often he would use this myth-making talent to hilarious effect. A good illustration is provided, for instance, by his visit to the great poet Paul Claudel. The majestic patriarch of Catholic letters—a genius of immense authority—had invited Waugh and Christopher Sykes to have lunch in his Paris apartment. This is how Waugh related the meeting in his diary:

Christopher Sykes, however, gave a completely different account. Not only had Claudel been perfectly hospitable, genial and lively, but virtually none of the grotesque incidents mentioned in Waugh’s narrative did actually take place. In particular, Waugh’s horrible
gaffe
was pure fiction. One would have guessed as much: it is very difficult to believe that Waugh, who admired Claudel, would not have known even the title of one of his masterpieces: “It
transpired
that he was the author of a work named
Partage de midi
. . .” It transpired indeed! (One is reminded of Philip Larkin’s tranquil impudence: “Deep down, I think foreign languages irrelevant.”) Shortly after the encounter with Claudel, Sykes was astonished to hear Waugh describing for the first time this fictitious incident to a common friend; he stuck to his invention after that, as he obviously had come to believe it sincerely. Perhaps it was not simply one more instance of the novelist’s instinct
at work; more exactly, “the novelist’s instinct” was itself an expression of a deeper defence against the threats which reality was directing at his self-esteem: from Sykes’ testimony, we know that, immediately before the visit, Waugh was virtually paralysed with nervousness—a most uncharacteristic and humiliating condition for a man whose powerful personality usually inspired fear in all those who approached him. (On their way to Claudel’s apartment, Waugh insisted that they first stop in a church to pray for success; and then during the entire visit, he feigned total ignorance of the French language, for fear of making mistakes and bringing ridicule upon himself.) Obviously, meeting Claudel had momentous meaning for him, and he was desperately eager to make a favourable impression on the grand old man. Yet, things did not work out the way he would have wished; as Sykes observed, “he somehow detected that Claudel, for all his geniality, did not like him.” In Waugh’s version, however, the
mot de la fin
was provided by Claudel commenting the next day to his daughter-in-law: “Waugh is
très
gentleman.” Actually this is probably a clue for the deep wound which may have triggered the entire fiction: according to Sykes, Claudel’s impression was precisely the opposite: “Later, Claudel told a friend of mine that he had been very interested to meet Evelyn Waugh, ‘
Mais
,’ he added, ‘
il lui manque l’allure du vrai gentleman
’ (‘he does not look like a real gentleman’)!”

Similar examples of bizarre incidents abound in Waugh’s life and make his biography remarkably colourful. (Stannard’s work, which is masterful and seems definitive, should not make us neglect the earlier study by Sykes, with its wealth of anecdotes; and more recently, in his autobiography, Auberon Waugh has produced a portrait of his father which, in its utterly unsentimental truthfulness, is deeply affecting.[
1
]) There was, however, a dark side to his imaginative power: he had suffered from recurrent bouts of persecution mania since his early twenties, and after his first wife’s traumatic desertion he exhibited symptoms of schizophrenia. In late middle age, his most frightening slide into hallucinations and lunacy was faithfully chronicled in
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
. Eventually this latter breakdown was diagnosed as having resulted from a progressive poisoning induced by his protracted abuse of strong sleeping drugs; yet it is interesting to note
that at first he consulted a priest, as he wondered if he was not possessed by the Devil. (Some twenty-five years earlier, when Belloc first met the brilliant young novelist, Waugh’s future mother-in-law asked the old sage’s opinion of Waugh, and Belloc made the startling reply: “He has a devil in him.”)

While in the army during the war he had been forced to submit to a psychological examination, because of his erratic and impossible behaviour: “The doctor appears to have been told that Waugh was a drunkard and tried to impute to him (with some good reason) unhappiness and frustration through adolescence. Waugh suffered ninety minutes of this and managed at last to turn the tables: ‘You have been asking me a great many questions. Do you mind if I now ask you one?’ The psychiatrist offered no objection. ‘Why then,’ Waugh asked, ‘have you not questioned me about the most important thing in a man’s life—his religion?’”

There is no doubt that religion was indeed the most important thing in Waugh’s life. Any biographer who failed to recognise this would be wasting their time—and ours. Such a reproach was directed at Stannard by one critic, but seems to me unwarranted. Stannard not only provides a wealth of inspiring quotes from Waugh’s writings, but has also unearthed impressive evidence of charitable deeds which Waugh secretly performed as a form of spiritual cultivation, and which bear eloquent testimony to the absolute seriousness of his commitment. If he sometimes brought to the everyday practice of his Catholic faith some of the eccentricity which also characterised most other aspects of his life (for instance, as an acquaintance recalled, during Lent, when having lunch in a restaurant, he would produce miniature scales at the table to weigh out precisely the quantities of allowable food!), his faith was not a matter for posturing; it cost him too dearly, in every respect, for its sincerity to be questioned. In his remarkable correspondence, whenever the subject of religion is being discussed, he relinquishes his usual whimsicality and writes with simplicity, depth, gravity and a most touching sense of urgency. For all his gluttony and drunkenness, his passionate attachment to all things of beauty, his selfishness, his impatience, his unkindness and anger (a close friend once asked how he could reconcile his generally beastly
behaviour and his Christianity; Waugh replied: “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid, I would hardly be a human being”), what he derived from his Catholicism was a fundamental ability not to take this world too seriously. Stannard shows a sound grasp of this central issue in his choice of a subtitle for the second and final volume of his biographical study,
No Abiding City
—a reference to St. Paul (Hebrews XIII, 14):
non enim habemus hic manentem civitatem, sed futuram inquirimus
(“For we have here no abiding city, but we seek one that is to come”), which Waugh was particularly fond of quoting. Chesterton had already observed: “The Church is the only thing that can save a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of one’s own time,” but for Waugh, the Church not only secured liberation from the world, it also provided a force and an inspiration to go
against
the world—
contra mundum
.

Among Waugh’s works,
The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox
—a biography of the scholarly priest who translated the Vulgate into English—is probably one of the less read; the author had intended it essentially as an act of
pietas
to the memory of a deceased friend. Yet nothing written by Waugh is indifferent; at the very beginning of this book there is an episode of haunting power, which although bearing little relation to the main topic, must obviously have affected Waugh in a very personal way. In a few memorable pages, he describes the death of Knox’s maternal grandfather, an Anglican clergyman who ended his missionary life in Zanzibar in a state of total poverty, loneliness and dereliction, under the indifferent and uncomprehending eyes of the natives. This seems to have been a theme that presented special meaning for Waugh. Earlier on, for instance, he once summed up the subject of
A Handful of Dust
as “the civilised man’s helpless plight among savages.” The interesting twist in the latter description is that, if indeed the main character of the novel ends up as a captive in the Amazonian jungle, this final mishap occurs merely as a sort of epilogue—actually the true savages who destroyed his life with mindless cruelty were smart members of fashionable London society.