EVELYN WAUGH, ‘LIFE’ (INTERNATIONAL: CHICAGO)
8 April 1946, 53-4, 56, 58, 60
FAN-FARE
A distinguished English novelist, finding his latest book a best-seller, explains himself and his works to his new American admirers
by EVELYN WAUGH
An аnswer to the ladies all over the U.S.A. (and to the man) who hate been kind enough to write to Evelyn Waugh about his recent novel, “Brideshead Revisited”:
FREQUENTLY, unobtrusively, in the last 17 years I have had books published in the United States of America. No one noticed them. A parcel would appear on my breakfast table containing a familiar work with a strange wrapper and sometimes a strange title; an item would recur in my agent’s accounts: “Unearned advance on American edition,” and that was the end of the matter. Now, unseasonably, like a shy waterfowl who has hatched out a dragon’s egg, I find that I have written a “best-seller.” “Unseasonably,” because the time has passed when the event brings any substantial reward. In a civilized age this unexpected moment of popularity would have endowed me with a competency for life. But perhaps in a civilized age I should not be so popular. As it is the politicians confiscate my earnings and I am left with the correspondence.
This is something new to me, for Englishwomen do not write letters to men they do not know; indeed they seldom write letters to anyone nowadays; they are too hard-driven at home. Even before the war English readers were seldom seen or heard. It is true that there are facilities for writers whose vanity so inclines them to join literary associations, make speeches and even expose themselves to view at public luncheons, but no one expects it of them or respects them for it. Instead of the Liberty, Equality and Fraternity of the Americas, Europe offers its artists Liberty, Diversity and Privacy. Perhaps it is for this that so many of the best American writers go abroad. But, as Hitler observed, there are no islands in the modern world. I have momentarily become an object of curiosity to Americans and I find that they believe that my friendship and confidence are included in the price of my book.
Try and spot a novelist
My father taught me that it was flagitious to leave a letter of any kind unanswered. (Indeed his courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.) I therefore eagerly accept this chance of answering collectively all the cordial inquiries I have received. Please believe me, dear ladies, it is not sloth or “snootiness” that prevents my writing to you individually. It is simply that I cannot afford it. The royalty on your copy, by the time I have paid my taxes, literally does not leave me the price of a stamp.
You require to know what I look like? Well, I am 42 years of age, in good health, stockily built—no, I really cannot go on. Let me merely say that the tailors and hairdressers and hosiers of the small parish of St. James’s, London do all they can to render a naturally commonplace appearance completely inconspicuous. Stand on the pavement and scan the aquarium-faces which pass and gape and pass again in my club window; try and spot a novelist. You will not spot me. I once had an intellectual friend who complained that my appearance was noticeable in Bloomsbury. But I seldom leave St. James’s when I am in London, and I seldom go to London at all. I live in a shabby stone house in the country, where nothing is under a hundred years old except the plumbing and that does not work. I collect old books in an inexpensive, desultory way. I have a fast-emptying cellar of wine and gardens fast reverting to jungle. I am very contentedly married. I have numerous children whom I see once a day for ten, I hope, awe-inspiring minutes. In the first ten years of adult life I made a large number of friends. Now on the average I make one new one a year and lose two. It is all quite dull, you see; nothing here is worth the poke of a sightseer’s sunshade.
No prophet and no hack
It was not always thus with me. In youth I gadded about, and in those years and in the preposterous years of the Second World War I collected enough experience to last several lifetimes of novel writing. If you hear a novelist say he needs to collect “copy,” be sure he is no good. Most of the great writers led very quiet lives; when, like Cervantes, they were adventurous, it was not for professional reasons. When I gadded, among savages and people of fashion and politicians and crazy generals, it was because I enjoyed them. I have settled down now because I ceased to enjoy them and because I have found a much more abiding interest—the English language. My father, who was a respected literary critic of his day, first imbued me with the desire to learn this language, of which he had a mastery. It is the most lavish and delicate which mankind has ever known. It is in perpetual danger of extinction and has survived so far by the combination of a high civilized society, where it was spoken and given its authority and sanctity, with a thin line of devotees who made its refinement and adornment their life’s work. The first of these is being destroyed; if the thing is to be saved it will be by the second. I did not set out to be a writer. My first ambition was to paint. I had little talent but I enjoyed it as, I believe, many very bad writers enjoy writing. I spent some time at an art school which was not as wantonly wasted as it seemed then. Those hours with the plaster casts taught me to enjoy architecture, just as the hours with the Greek paradigms, now forgotten, taught me to enjoy reading English. I have never, until quite lately, enjoyed writing. I am lazy and it is intensely hard work. I wanted to be a man of the world and I took to writing as I might have taken to archaeology or diplomacy or any other profession, as a means of coming to terms with the world. Now I see it as an end in itself. Most European writers suffer a climacteric at the age ol 40. Youthful volubility carries them so far. After that they either become prophets or hacks or esthetes. (American writers, I think-nearly all become hacks.) I am no prophet and, I hope, no hack.
That, I think, answers the second question so often put to me in the last few weeks: “When can we expect another Brideshead Revisited?” Dear ladies, never. I can never hope to engage your attention again in quite the same way. I have already shaken off one of the American critics, Mr. Edmund Wilson, who once professed a generous interest in me. He was outraged (quite legitimately by his standards) at finding God introduced into my story. I believe that you can only leave God out by making your characters pure abstractions. Countless admirable writers, perhaps some of the best in the world, succeed in this. Henry James was the last of them. The failure of modern novelists since and including James Joyce is one of presumption and exorbitance. They are not content with the artificial figures which hitherto passed so gracefully as men and women. They try to represent the whole human mind and soul anil yet omit its determining character—that of being God’s creature with a defined purpose.
So in my future books there will be two things to make them unpopular: a preoccupation with style and the attempt to represent man more fully, which, to me, means only one thing, man in his relation to God.
You, Mrs. Schultz, arc an individual
But before we part company there are other questions you ask which Г will try to answer. A lady in Hempstead, N. Y. asks me whether 1 consider my characters “typical.” No, Mrs. Schultz, I do not. It i.s horrible of you to ask. A novelist has no business with types; they are the property of economists and politicians and advertisers and the other professional bores of our period. The artist is interested only in individuals. The statesman who damned the age with the name “the Century of the Common Man” neglected to notice the simple, historical fact that it is the artists, not the statesmen, who decide the character of a period. The Common Man does not exist. He is an abstraction invented by bores for bores. Even you, dear Mrs. Schultz, are an individual. Do not ask yourself, when you read a story, “Is this the behavior common to such and such an age group, income group, psychologically conditioned group?” but, “Why did these particular people behave in this particular way?” Otherwise you are wasting your time in reading works of imagination at all.
A note on Captain Grimes
There is another more intelligent question more often asked: “Are your characters drawn from life?” In the broadest sense, ot course, they are. None except one or two negligible minor figures is a portrait; all the major characters are the result of numberless diverse observations fusing in the imagination into a single whole. My problem has been to distill comedy and sometimes tragedy from the knockabout farce of people’s outward behavior. Men and women as I see them would not be credible if they were literally transcribed; for instance the international journalists whom I met for a few delirious weeks in Addis Ababa, some of whose abandoned acts I tried to introduce into Scoop. Or there is the character Captain Grimes in Decline and Fall. I knew such a man. One of the more absurd escapades of my youth, the result of a debt-settlement conference with my father after which I undertook to make myself financially independent of him, was to take a job as master at a private school. There I met a man who made what has seemed to me the lapidary statement, “This looks like being the first end ol term I’ve seen, old boy, for two years.” But had I written anything like a full account of his iniquities, my publishers and I would have been in the police court.
As for the major characters, I really have very little control over them. I start them off with certain preconceived notions of what they will do and say in certain circumstances but I constantly find them moving another way. For example there was the heroine of Put Out More Flags, a Mrs. Lyne. I had no idea until halfway through the book that she drank secretly. I could not understand why she behaved so oddly. Then when she sat down suddenly on the steps of the cinema I understood all and I had to go back and introduce a series of empty bottles into her flat. I was on board a troopship at the time. There is a young destroyer commander who sat next to me at table who can bear witness of this. He asked me one day at luncheon how my book was going. I said, “Badly. I can’t understand it at all” and then quite suddenly “I know. Mrs. Lyne has been drinking.”
A Handful of Dust, on the other hand, began at the end. I had written a short story about a man trapped in the jungle, ending his days reading Dickens aloud. The idea came quite naturally from the experience of visiting a lonely settler of that kind and reflecting how easily he could hold me prisoner. Then, after the short story was written and published, the idea kept working in my mind. I wanted to discover how the prisoner got there, and eventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savage at home and the civilized man’s helpless plight among them.
People sometimes say to me, “I met someone exacdy like a character out of one of your books.” I meet them everywhere, not by choice but luck. I believe the world is populated by them. Before the war it was sometimes said that i must move in a very peculiar circle. Then I joined the army and served six years, mostly with regular soldiers who are reputed to be uniformly conventional. I found myself under the command and in the mess with one man of startling singularity after another. I have come to the conclusion
that there is no such thing as normality. That is what makes storytelling such an absorbing task, the attempt to reduce to order the anarchic raw materials of life.
That leads to another question: “Are your books meant to be satirical?” No. Satire is a matter of period. It flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous moral standards—the early Roman Empire and 18th Century Europe. It is aimed at inconsistency and hypocrisy. Itexposes polite cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue. The artist’s only service to the disintegrated society of today is to create little independent systems of order of his own. I foresee in the dark age opening that the scribes may play the part of the monks after the first barbarian victories. They were not satirists.
About cliches and snobbery
A final question: “Do you consider Brideshead Revisited your best book?” Yes. A Handful of Dust, my favorite hitherto, dealt entirely with behavior. It was humanist and contained all I had to say about humanism. Brideshead Revisited is vastly more ambitious; perhaps less successful, but I am not deterred either by popular applause or critical blame from being rather proud of the attempt. In particular I am not the least worried about the charge of using cliches. I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners. It comes from keeping second-rate company. Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases. There are many occasions in writing when one needs an unobtrusive background to action, when the landscape must become conventionalized if the foreground is to have the right prominence. I do not believe that a serious writer has ever been shy of an expression because it has been used before. It is the writer of advertisements who is always straining to find bizarre epithets for commonplace objects.
Nor am I worried at the charge of snobbery. Class consciousness, particularly in England, has been so much inflamed nowadays that to mention a nobleman is like mentioning a prostitute 60 years ago. The new prudes say, “No doubt such people do exist but we would sooner not hear about them.” I reserve the right to deal with the kind of people I know best.
One criticism does deeply discourage me: a postcard from a man (my sole male correspondent) in Alexandria, Va. He says, “Your Brideshead Revisited is a strange way to show that Catholicism is an answer to anything. Seems more like the kiss of Death.” I can only say: I am sorry Mr. McClose, I did my best. I am not quite clear what you mean by the “kiss of Death” but I am sure it is gruesome. Is it something to do with halitosis? If so I have failed indeed and my characters have got wildly out of hand once more.