Evelyn Waugh | Thornfield Hall

I am treating myself to 20th-century novels after my marathon of Greek tragedy last spring. I am still haunted by Medea’s strikingly feminist quote, “I would rather stand in front of the shield three times than give birth once.” But it foreshadows the horror ahead.

And so I am relaxing with Evelyn Waugh’s World War II classic, the Sword of Honour trilogy. These semi-autographical novels, Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender, record military botches, successes, and battles. Waugh wouldn’t be Waugh without humor, but this is nothing like Waugh’s witty satires, Vile Bodies, Scoop, and The Loved One. Waugh has a wicked sense of humor, but this is a serious work.

This is the story of Guy Crouchback, a devout Catholic who returns from the family manse in Italy to England to enlist in the army and fight Hitler. He approaches all his friends and contacts. They say he is too old (he is in his mid-thirties). They tell him it’s not like the last war, when they needed “cannon fodder.” Guy is so unhappy and lonely that he is willing to be cannon fodder.

But he cheers up when his father introduces him to an officer in a Scottish brigade, the Halberdiers, where he can undergo officer training. There is a large, colorful cast of characters, some likable, others very peculiar, but on a third reading I am especially fond of his roommate Althorpe, a ridiculously meticulous, silly, paranoid man in his thirties who is obsessed with his chemical toilet, the Thunderbox. He recruits Guy. to help him hide it from their fellow officers, but one-eyed Colonel Ritchie-Hook, known for decapitating his victims of war, repeatedly steals it. Much space is devoted to the fate of the Thunderbox, that unlikely prize of war.

I’m on the third volume, and again it is such a treat.

I hope you, too, enjoy your summer reading!

“Too, too sick-making,” said Miss Runcible, with one of her rare flashes of accuracy. – “Vile Bodies,” by Evelyn Waugh

It is difficult to pick my favorite Evelyn Waugh satire. I am fond of Scoop and The Loved One, which are less dark than my other favorite, A Handful of Dust. But I just reread Vile Bodies, which I had not appreciated on a first reading, and this time I loved it. I suspect the reason I didn’t enjoy it the first time is that it is absolutely terrifying under the glitzy surface, .

At the center of this raucous satiric comedy, set in the 1920s or “the near future,” as Waugh writes in the preface, there are two penniless lovers, Adam Syme and Nina Blount, who cannot afford to marry. Adam has finished writing his memoir in France and has a contract with an English editor, but two English Customs officers search his suitcase and confiscate his manuscript and the Purgatorio, though neither is on the banned book list. One of the Customs officers says, “If we can’t stamp out literature in this country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.”

Doesn’t it sound very contemporary? There have been many attempts to ban books in recent years, but so far the judges are holding the line. I can’t get excited about romantasies, in which faeries may or may not be having sex, but all libraries should have the classics. (N.B. I have nothing against romantasies.)

But it’s not just books: it’s the whole Bright Young Things life-style. It’s like being a Beat, or a hipster. Two female Customs officers yank aside socialite Agatha Runcible and strip-search her. They have mistaken her for a jewel thief.

Agatha is richer and louder than Adam. In fact, she is, if I may say so, in the vanguard of the MeToo movement. She tells Adam the whole story of her humiliation. She plans to ring up all the newspapers and tell the Cabinet members.

I love Agatha’s noisy voice and goofy, constant use of “too, too.”

“My dear, I can’t tell you the things that have been happening to me in there. The way they looked… too, too shaming. Positively surgical, my dear, and such wicked old women…”

In Vile Bodies, Waugh is fascinated by doubles, There are gossip columnist doubles, one successful, the other not. (The unsuccessful columnist commits suicide after he is blackballed by a society hostess.) Adam takes over the gossip column, and manages to avoid litigious society people by inventing all the people, parties, and clubs. But he loses the job after Nina substitutes for him when he is out of town.

In the women’s realm, there is both doubling and mimicking. Agatha is so fascinating that she attracts a wannabe-double. Miss Brown suggests that Agatha and her friends should have their after-party at Miss Brown’s house. Miss Brown is thrilled to be scrambling eggs for Agatha’s set in her kitchen, and overjoyed when Agatha asks if she can crash there. It’s not till the next morning that Agatha discovers she has spent the night at 10 Downing Street. The journalists and columnists are waiting outside. This pretty much quashes Miss Brown’s doubling talents and her father’s career.

This is a satire, but it never loses touch with reality. Waugh skewers superficial revelers and gossips, and, more gently, friends and lovers. But Death also rears its ugly head. One of my favorite characters dies after a characteristically ridiculous accident. I wanted to scream, No, no, no!

But that’s Waugh. He’s not a kind writer, is he? Not until his more serious later books.

Waugh writes in the preface of Vile Bodies (1930) that it “is set in the near future, when existing tendencies have become more marked.” I realized that we are, more or less, living in Waugh’s near future, almost 100 years later.

It gave me a jolt.

But I loved the book on this reading, and have added it to my favorite Waugh list. I would like to go back and reread it immediately, but that would be self-indulgent, wouldn’t it?