Women play a peculiar and interesting role in the works of Mr Waugh. His male figures are not notably successful in their relations with the opposite sex - there are many love affairs and many married couples, but never a successful love affair leading to a stable marriage. His most successful women, artistically, are those who, for good or evil, carry the principle of their vitality uninvaded within themselves - Margot Metroland, Brenda Last, Julia Stitch, Barbara Sothill. Angela Lyne is a mask, Aimee Thanatogenos a symbol, Virginia Crouchback a tart — all highly desirable qualifications for a successful and sharp delineation. Celia Ryder, the sister of Boy Mulcaster, is one of these. ’ “I was glad when I found Celia was unfaithful,” said Charles. “I felt it was all right for me to dislike her.”’ So it was, artistically, since Ryder’s dislike is the key to the author’s success in depicting her, one of the long line of vapid and predatory females descending from Brenda Last and Lucy Sim-monds. Women who are being fulfilled in their biological functions receive short shrift from Mr Waugh: Celia Ryder sea-sick is Lucy Simmonds in child-birth. ‘I brought her the flowers from the sitting-room; they completed the atmosphere of a maternity ward which she had managed to create in the cabin.’ … ’ “Mrs Clark is being so sweet”; she was always quick to get the servants’ names.’
The world of Mr Waugh’s novels is essentially a male world; women gain admittance through being boyish, gamine and intelligent, or feminine, disreputable and disliked. The romantic heroine, compelling the ideal love of the male, the ‘She’ of the popular novelist and the psychologists, is mercifully absent. Only in the figure of Julia has she almost gained admittance, a figure from the vasty deeps of the unconscious without benefit of critical reason or humour, without the release of tension which comes from the occasional side-step into the world of whimsy, with hardly a touch of the eccentric oddity required by Charles’s aesthetic mentor Blanche. It is not her charm alone which is the source of her weakness. The treatment of Julia in the first books, with the story of her debutante year, her thoughts of marriage, and her delightful fantasy ‘of the kind of man who would do’, is still, in spite of the fairy story touch, wholly suitable. It is not, entirely, that she is a Marchmain — one of the family against which Anthony uttered his comprehensive warning. Sebastian is charming, and not a little odd, and his oddity increases and becomes more poignant when he is relegated to the wings and the safe aesthetic distance of Anthony’s account of the present and Cordelia’s fantasy of the future. He is, if not morally blameless, at least ‘right’ by Brideshead’s mad certainty of decision. Lady Marchmain is both charming and odd, saintly and yet a femme fatale - ’ “they never escape once she’s had her teeth in them”,’ reports Anthony Blanche; the discrepancy between neurosis and piety is ours to welcome, not to reconcile or explain. Charming and odd, charming and infuriating, charming and beastly, charming and disgraceful, all these combinations could plausibly be saved from Blanche’s condemnation - but not just ’ “creamy English charm, playing tigers”.’
The moment of Charles’s captivation to Julia’s creamy charm comes quite early. It comes with the fantasy of Julia as a ‘heroine of a fairy story turning over in her hands the magic ring; she had only to stroke it with her finger-tips and whisper the charmed word, for the earth to open at her feet and belch forth her titanic servant, the fawning monster’ - Rex Mottram. Now it was not unusual in Mr Waugh’s earlier works for the heroine - if such a term is appropriate — to throw in her lot with the successful, coarse, extravert male; Margot Beste-Chetwynde marries Lord Metroland and Nina goes off with Ginger. But there is very good reason why the hero should relinquish her and return to his College or to his loneliness; we are not concerned with the inner history of the female psyche after its association with the shallow man of affairs. Here, however, the heroine of the fairy story, when Charles meets her after ten years on the liner from New York, has, through contact with the world of Rex Mottram, become waif-like, her beauty has acquired an added air of sadness, ‘this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart’.
To Charles’ heart, in fact. Or to the author’s heart? We have here the difficulty, common in first-person narratives, of assessing whether the author is writing in person or in character. The critics had no doubt that the dinner in Paris where Charles, lost in the magical world of Marchmain, indulges himself at Rex’s expense in a meal which might have been taken out of a restaurant brochure, was Mr Waugh speaking in person, as an epicure, and said so caustically. There is certainly a streak of maudlin sentimentality about Charles, brought out and emphasized as, with the progress of their affair, Julia again recedes into a mysterious distance, and becomes, in her tight little gold tunic and evening gown, ever less tangible as an inhabitant of a real world. The peak of their inner estrangement, barely concealed by the accepted habit of past possession, and the summit of tension between the two, is the brutal reminder which Brides-head delivers of her irregular status, her passionate revolt against the very presence of her lover, and their momentary reconciliation. The lush passages increase and are spun out beyond the requirements of a disciplined style: ‘I saw her to bed; the blue lids fell over her eyes; her pale lips moved on the pillow; but whether to wish me good-night or to murmur a prayer — a jingle of the nursery that came to her now in the twilight world between sorrow and sleep: some ancient pious rhyme that had come down to Nanny Hawkins from centuries of bedtime whispering, through all the changes of language, from the days of pack-horses on the Pilgrim’s Way - I did not know.’ We are back in the world of Chesterton, but without his philosophical stringency. A way into the Church for Charles, this Tudor romanticism of pack horses on the Pilgrim’s Way? Perhaps, but not the way of many others, and only one part of that of Mr Waugh. A quotation from Mr Waugh’s review of Mr Greene’s The Unquiet American comes appositely to hand: ‘Fowler is base. So base that it is a disagreeable experience to be forced into intimacy with him, to have to hear the story from his lips and see it through his eyes.’ Substitute ‘Ryder is sentimental’ for ‘Fowler is base’, and the parallel, for passages such as this one, is exact. The review continues: ‘This can hardly be called an artistic fault, for it is part of the artist’s plain intention, but I think it is a lapse in taste.’ Mr Waugh’s artistic intention is, regrettably, not so plain.
It is not surprising that the passage considered above is followed by two full pages of the political-conversation pastiche which we have learnt to expect whenever Rex and his associates are introduced. Effective, this contrast of two worlds, but technically just out of focus, just emancipating itself from artistic tact. 1 “I wonder which is the more horrible,”’ says Charles to Julia,’ “Celia’s Art and Fashion or Rex’s Politics and Money.”’ Artistically, there is no doubt; Celia is perfectly delineated, but Rex suffers by too obvious contrast with the creamy charm of Sebastian and Julia. Well sketched in the early stages, Rex handling troublesome policemen, giving Julia a tortoise studded with diamonds, Rex swallowing religious instruction like a double brandy, is excellent. But the jangling and brash conversation of his political set, though effective, gives rise by reaction to Charles’s dinner at Maillard’s - ‘soup of oseilk, a sole quite simply cooked in a white wine sauce, a caneton a la presse, a lemon souffle’ - and the haunting, magical charm of Julia’s later moods. Julia’s hysterical outburst against her burden of sin -’ “no way back; the gates barred; all the saints and angels posted along the walls” ’ - is magnificent. But Charles’s own sentimental reaction surely justifies Anthony’s warning not to fall a victim to the Marchmains and their charm.