Whistling Shade

Gore Vidal called Evelyn Waugh 'our time's first satirist.' Edmond Wilson thought Waugh a `comic genius.' Vidal was the best satirist of his day and Wilson the greatest literary critic of his. Yet these two men did not agree on the nature of Waugh's writing.

Which should come as no surprise. Waugh's first novel, Decline and Fall, is often funny, but it's hardly satire. A Handful of Dust, if we focus on the first half of the book and overlook the second, is brilliant satire, right up there with The Loved One. These two novels are the only true satires Waugh wrote. The rest, and there are several, are largely comic novels.

It becomes necessary then to arrive at a definition of satire. J.A. Coddon writes that "[the satirist] takes it upon himself to correct, censure, and ridicule the follies and vices of society and thus to bring contempt and derision upon aberrations from a desirable and civilized norm." A desirable and civilized norm—that's the essential requirement, and if we add the condition that satire should focus on a prescribed subject, not an anarchic shooting from the hip, we have the prerequisites of a workable definition.

Decline and Fall, written at the age of twenty-five and published in 1928, was based in part on Waugh's experience as a school teacher in Wales. It follows the misfortunes of Paul Pennyfeather, an entirely passive anti-hero, as he is mistreated and bamboozled by various people he encounters, both male and female. The story is often funny, even eight decades after it was written, but there is no recognizable standard of behavior being censured, corrected and ridiculed.

Unlike Decline and Fall, a treatment touching on too many issues, A Handful of Dust, if we omit the second half of the novel, sticks to its primary subject, the mating practices of upper-class Britons. And tacky behavior among the rich being as common in our time as it was in 1934 when the book was written, it still reads well today.

Like Decline and Fall, Dust is based on Waugh's personal experience. He married Evelyn Gardner—the Waughs' friends referred to the couple as he-Evelyn and she-Evelyn—the daughter of Lord Burghclere and granddaughter of the 4th Earl of Carnarvon, but the marriage did not work out, due it seems to she-Evelyn's infidelity. Out of his wife's badly flawed behavior came flawless satire, a healthy response, it would seem, to a humiliating experience. In A Handful of Dust a man referred to simply as Beaver in the English surname-only fashion, a near-penniless but we assume upper-class young man judging from those he associates with, visits the estate of Tony and Brenda Last, who are enjoying an ideal marriage of seven years' duration. Brenda is taken by the pathetic Beaver, a man ridiculed by all those who know him and who is invited to the party only when all others have turned the hostess down. Tony is the faithful, loving husband keeping the home fires burning on his vast estate; while Brenda, after years of marriage, becomes something of a tramp. Here we have real satire, a standard—Brenda's behavior is not unique; it is no less shabby than that of her upper class friends. It is a standard to be censured and ridiculed, and in the character of Tony, corrected. He first agrees to divorce Brenda, which in England at the time required that one of the pair be caught in adultery. Tony nobly agrees to be the victim to save Brenda from public scandal, and actually goes through with a sham adulterous night in a hotel with a paid prostitute. He changes his mind on divorce after Brenda's brother Reggie tries to shake him down for an exorbitant alimony settlement. In a hilarious luncheon scene, Waugh skewers the boorish brother:

He clearly had more to say on the subject [of the divorce] and was meditating the most convenient approach. He ate in a ruthless manner, champing his food (it was his habit often, without noticing it, to consume things that others usually left on their plates, the head and tales of whiting, whole mouthfuls of chicken bone, peach stones and apple cores, cheese rinds and the fibrous part of the artichoke). "Besides, you know," he said, "it isn't as though it was all Brenda's fault."

The second half of the novel, covering Tony's trip abroad to deal with the consequences of his ruined marriage, does not read like a continuation of the previous story. And for good reason: Waugh wrote the story of an Englishman penetrating the Amazon jungles on a trip of archeological discovery first as a free-standing story and then pasted it on to Dust to give his book an ending. This attached story is not satirical or even particularly funny. It's a good story, wry with a superb ending, but it contains far more journey detail than the story of adultery can support, reading in fact like the beginning of a new novel. And this second story's ending, good as it is, has nothing to do with the original tale, requiring a detached coda taking us back to part one to sum up the ruin of Tony and Brenda's marriage.

Waugh published The Loved One in 1948, and it remains his crowning satirical masterpiece. Set in and around Los Angeles, the story opens with a sketch of the English ex-patriot community in Hollywood, moves on to The Happier Hunting Ground, a pet cemetery employing the renegade English anti-hero of the novel, then to Whispering Glades, California's pretentious monument to sentimental burial practices and the location of the major actions of the satire. The Loved One eviscerates the American way of death as it is practiced at Whispering Glades (and a good many other sites). Much of the novel's humor and satirical bite rises from the simpering, sickeningly sweet language Waugh employs: at Whispering Glades, Loved Ones (always in caps) do not die, they `pass over'; while the Waiting Ones wait (`to cross the narrow stream and join the Loved One,' in the words of the Dreamer, founder of Whispering Glades) they are pitched by the staff on Before Need Arrangements (prepaid death policies). All then move on to the Slumber Rooms, each room named after a flower—Daffodil, Primrose—where the Loved One is laid out on a chaise lounge posed to recall some characteristic trait when living—a writer's corpse with a pipe in its mouth; a woman dressed for dinner, cocktail in hand; or "in the case of children, we usually give them a toy to hold."

The cemetery, as an extravagant final resting place for the Loved Ones, is divided into zones. The Waiting Ones select a zone specific to the deceased's interests when alive, or the deceased's survivor's ability to pay—Pilgrims Rest, the cheapest, lying behind the fuel dump; Lover's Nest, Poet's Corner, or perhaps Shadow Land, the final resting places of those in the film industry. The very rich do, of course, have an island all their own. Each zone has its own nauseating sentimental amenities—statuary, music, terminology—where every gooey notion of the Waiting Ones is a wish fulfilled. With hilarious detail Waugh walks us through the burial treatment from intake at Essential Data:

"English are purely Caucasian, Mr. Barlow. This is a restricted park. The Dreamer has made that rule for the sake of the Waiting Ones. In their time of trial they prefer to be with their own people."

"The two piece lid is most popular for gentlemen Loved Ones. Only the upper part is then exposed to view."

"But I say, I don't think that will quite do. I've seen him. He's terribly disfigured, you know [Sir Francis hung himself.]"

"If there is any special little difficulties in the case just mention them to our cosmeticians. ...They have never failed yet. ...We had one last month who was found drowned. He had been in the sea a month and they only identified him by his wrist watch."

And when he reaches Aimeé, the cosmetician and assistant to Mr. Joyboy, chief embalmer:

Her hair was dark and straight, her brows wide, her skin transparent and untarnished by the sun. Her lips were artificially tinctured, no doubt, but not coated like her sisters' and clogged in all their delicate pores with crimson grease; they seemed to promise instead an unmeasured range of sensual converse. Her face was oval, her profile pure and classical and light. Her eyes greenish and remote, with a rich glint of lunacy.

"...with a rich glint of lunacy." Waugh is very good at ending a line with just the right words to give a wrenching satirical twist to an otherwise conventional passage.

To the end he [Sir Francis, the Loved One] was the least vain of literary men and in consequence the least remembered.

And Aimeé, the cosmetician, speaking of the dead Sir Francis:

It is difficult to stop quoting from The Loved One, and it remains one of the funniest, and best structured, short novels yet written. It's a gory little tale, what Waugh called his `little nightmare,' and not for the squeamish: for much of the book, Waugh is preoccupied with the cadaver and its wondrous transformation in the hands of the staff of Whispering Glades. But it is not simply an disembowelment of American funereal mores; the novel has a plot with love interests which grows increasingly hilarious as the story progresses.

Waugh's fictional account of death rituals in California would give rise to Jessica Mitford's immensely successful, The American Way of Death, not a work of fiction but as satirical in its effect as is The Loved One.

Evelyn Waugh was born to a family of writers—his father was an essayist and publisher, and his older brother Alec, two years after being sent down from Sherborne, a secondary boys school of reputation, published The Loom of Youth, a novel exploring the school's passionate homosexual relationships. This caused a scandal that sent Evelyn to a school of lesser reputation because Sherborne would not have him.

After divorcing Evelyn Gardner, Waugh converted to Catholicism and married another granddaughter of the 4th Earl of Carnavon, this one a Catholic. Waugh's conversion would in time carry him into the conservative camp of a conservative church, going so far as to publicly wish that the Spanish Armada had won the battle. He apparently took his Catholicism to heart, fathering seven children by this second wife in a marriage that would last until his death.

Waugh carried satire even into his private life. "I despise all my children equally," he commented at one point, and then, at his death, left his millions to a `Save the Children' fund, his children, which suggests the unkind comment may have more to do with the pretensions of his class than with his satirical craft: upper class Englishmen love to cultivate eccentricity, and Waugh, whose position in that class was not all that secure—he came from an affluent middle class family—perhaps took on the mannerisms of his betters as proof of membership.

Waugh wrote a great many other comic novels, but none as successfully as The Loved One. Scoop (1938), a humorous take on journalism, is too silly to be believed (and at least a kernel of realism is essential to good satire). Vile Bodies, another comic novel written in 1930, is simply tiresome.

If there is a weakness in Waugh's best satirical work, it lies in his choice of subjects. Like most modern satirists, Waugh preferred light subjects lightly taken. Gore Vidal was of the same school, in his fiction but not in his essays, which can be vicious. In their fiction, both wrote for a mass audience, and so as not to offend, at least not irremediably, they chose defenseless subjects: Hollywood, politics, the press, sex, subjects long the butt of jokes, long since emasculated. They have become easy targets because the public's perception of them is pretty much that of their satirists: few take them seriously.

Inoffensive subjects, with one exception—Waugh's Black Mischief. Waugh's malicious comic novel of Haile Selassie's efforts to modernize Ethiopia was published in 1932 when racism was more accepted and apartheid the rule. While a good read, Black Mischief would not see print today. No publisher would touch it. Its racist remarks and ridicule of a small black African nation would never get by a censor, despite Waugh's scornful treatment of white colonials rendered with the same glee as his ridicule of black manners.¹

Which brings us to the rise of political correctness and the death of satire. There are so many subjects today that cannot be touched—religion, race, women's rights, minority rights—the list goes on and on—that attempts to navigate the narrows of political correctness result in wimpy parodies of innocuous subjects. How long has it been since we've had a truly Voltaireian satirist (who took on the Catholic Church, among others, the most powerful institution of his day)?

After Salman Rushdie published his Satanic Verses, thought by some to ridicule the Prophet, it was necessary for him to go underground for years to survive the wrath of religious fanatics who had put a price on his head. More shameful still, John Le Carré—speaking as a renowned novelist of the Western World—had this to say on the subject: "I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity."² Which makes one ask if Le Carré is not only in sympathy with the Rushdie death threats, but is prepared as well to throw his moral support behind the Inquisition.

How then, in an age of suffocating political correctness and righteous posturing, can the satirist do his duty, which is "to correct, censure, and ridicule the follies and vices of society?"

¹It is for this reason that literary Ethiopians are said not to find Black Mischief offensive. In his satire, Waugh was magnanimous in his derision: white colonials come off no better than the Africans.

Evelyn Waugh: Satirist or Comic Genius?

by Hugh Mahoney