Catholic literature is rarely pious. In ways that sometimes trouble or puzzle both Protestant and secular readers, Catholic writing tends to be comic, rowdy, rude, and even violent. Catholics generally prefer to write about sinners rather than saints. (It is not only that sinners generally make more interesting protagonists. Their failings also more vividly demonstrate humanity’s fallen state.)
—Dana Gioia, “The Catholic Writer Today” (First Things)
Today I finished Decline and Fall, the comedy debut of English Catholic writer Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), who was only twenty-five years old at the time of publication. This was a fun read, and “fun” is not a word that I usually apply to my diet of reading. Teachers, like myself, will appreciate the story because it lampoons educational institutions, both Oxford University and the fictional Llanabba Castle in Wales. Waugh’s humor has a medicinal quality, alleviating dis-ease through laughter.
Decline and Fall, similar to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, resembles a genre of fiction known as a picaresque novel, which relates “the adventures of a rogue or lowborn adventurer (Spanish pícaro) as he drifts from place to place and from one social milieu to another in his effort to survive” (Britannica). Here is a description of the story:
Decline and Fall, first novel of Evelyn Waugh, published in 1928, a social satire based on his own experiences as a teacher. The protagonist, Paul Pennyfeather, accepts passively all that befalls him. Expelled for indecent behaviour from Scone College, Oxford, he becomes a teacher. When taken up by Margot, a wealthy society woman, he undergoes a series of outrageous experiences. Because of Margot’s involvement in the white slave trade, he suffers imprisonment, which he bears stoically. After Margot engineers his escape from prison, he returns to Scone College as a student of theology, pretending to be Paul Pennyfeather, a remote cousin of the notorious man of the same name. (Britannica)
Beneath Waugh’s farcical comedy, there is a trenchant critique of modern life, whether the coddling of elites in British public (read: private) schools, the epidemic of loneliness, the self-indulgent lifestyle of the 1920s Jazz Age, the spiritual vacuity of an established church in England, the inhumanity of modernist architecture, or the daftness of psychoanalysis applied to penology.
In The Arena of Satire: Juvenal’s Search for Rome, classicist David H. J. Larmour argues that some of Waugh’s novels belong to Juvenalian satire, “any bitter and ironic criticism of contemporary persons and institutions that is filled with personal invective, angry moral indignation, and pessimism” (Brittanica). In Decline and Fall,
the cast is described by one critic, Douglas Patey, as “guardians who don’t guard, teachers who don’t teach, servants who don’t serve, and parents who don’t parent . . . priests without faith, unjust judges, a physician who kills, mannish women and womanish men, childlike adults and children such as Peter Pastmaster (at the age of fifteen an expert mixer of cocktails) prematurely catapulted into adult knowingness.” With its mocking of various nationalities and races (Sebastian “Chokey” Cholmondley, a black American jazz musician, is a notorious example), its scorn for metropolitan aristocrats (Lord and Lady Circumference), and rural bumpkins (the Welsh) alike, its unreliable speakers, and its numerous topical references, literary allusions, and lively vocabulary including a great deal of contemporary argot, the text is, as David Bradshaw notes, an “all-enveloping satire” that is very much in the Juvenalian mode.
Literary critic Micah Mattix writes, “[Waugh’s] first two novels — Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930) — show how a barbaric ‘modernism’ displaced traditional English values, rendering life an absurd crapshoot in which only the lucky or witty survive.” If luck or wit are the options for surviving the “absurd crapshoot,” an alternative option is available for thriving: faith. Written prior to Waugh’s conversion to Catholicism in 1930, it is already clear that the author was Christ-haunted. The protagonist of Decline and Fall, Paul Pennyfeather, begins and ends the story as a student of theology, who aspires to serve as a clergyman in the Church of England. After the “fall” from Oxford, which might be regarded as a state of innocence, Paul enters a period of “decline,” first as a schoolmaster, then as a society dandy, and finally as a prisoner. By the time he returns to Oxford, Paul has undergone a “death” and “resurrection,” thereby entering a state of grace after his descent into absurdity, where he at least has the potential to become a bona fide churchman, who is saved by faith (Ephesians 2:8-9), as opposed to a “modern churchman” like Mr. Prendergast, who is damned by doubts (James 1:6). Three times in the novel a toast is ironically raised “to Fortune, a much-maligned lady,” who turns her wheel, it seems, for an anti-hero to find his bearings in a topsy-turvy world.
In an essay for First Things, “Waugh on the Merits,” Paul V. Mankowski praises three features of Waugh’s writing that distinguishes him as one of the greatest prose stylists in the English language:
In addition to works published in his lifetime, Waugh left behind several hundred pages of diaries and thousands of letters. And in reading these we become aware that sometime between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, he acquired an almost freakishly mature mastery of English prose. For the remainder of his life, he was all but incapable of writing a boring sentence. Even in his commonplace and perfunctory communications—business correspondence, military reports, letters to agents and headmasters—Waugh wrote a clean, elegant, beautifully precise English that is appetizing in the most unpromising circumstances. Just as it’s unsettling to be reminded that Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier was a set of keyboard exercises composed “for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning,” it’s remarkable how much eerily flawless craftsmanship Waugh displays even when the occasion of his writing is casual or mundane.
The most outstanding characteristic of Waugh’s prose is its lucidity. Every sentence is clear. Even where his subject matter is thorny, I don’t believe I’ve ever had to read a sentence twice over to get its meaning. His friend and fellow novelist Graham Greene remarked that what struck him about Waugh’s writing was its transparency, that you could see all the way to the bottom, as with the Mediterranean in days gone by. This transparency is partly attributable to perfect syntax—grammatical solecisms are almost nonexistent—and partly to Waugh’s care in choosing the right word, the word that not only conveys but illuminates. Sometimes Waugh employs a recondite word from his compendious vocabulary, but never an obscure word for the sake of its obscurity. As a boy I learned the meaning of many words I had never before encountered from the perfect fit they were given by Waugh in a single memorable phrase. Reading Waugh, you don’t need a dictionary at your elbow; the sentence provides sufficient light on its own.
Waugh also had a genius for conveying spoken English matched only, perhaps, by James Joyce. Like Joyce, he lets us hear the speakers through their dialogue—their accents; their treble or contralto, their coughs, stammers, and lisps; their whining or their barking—and he does this with almost no departure from standard spelling. We recognize cockneys without resort to dropped aitches and Scotsmen without resort to tripled r’s; we recognize them because the speeches Waugh gives them convince us that only this cockney or only this Scotsman could utter them. Their language informs us about his characters’ class, age, education, and provenance with a certainty that makes further description superfluous. So too their brief speeches give us a glimpse into his characters’ souls that clumsier authors would require many pages of narrative to communicate.
Almost miraculous in this respect is Waugh’s first novel, titled Decline and Fall, whose minor characters, though mere props in a farce, have a kind of inevitability and immortality: Once having read the lines Waugh gives them, you can’t imagine their ever saying anything else. Something imperishable has been created out of nothing. You feel you’d know Dr. Fagan and Lady Beste-Chetwynde were you to overhear them in a bus. The quality persists in Waugh’s later works, but only sporadically and only in the minor characters.
A third characteristic of Waugh the prose stylist is the concord between the rhythm of the paragraph and its meaning—a concord that is easier to perceive than it is to analyze. By the operation of some deep poetic instinct, the rise and fall of the narrative augment and reinforce the sense of the words that underlie it. Here is one example, from the travel book When the Going Was Good, describing an encounter with a young American on a lake steamer on the way to the Congo:
I offered him a drink and he said “Oh no, thank you,” in a tone which in four monosyllables contrived to express first surprise, then pain, then reproof, and finally forgiveness. Later I found that he was a member of the Seventh Day Adventist Mission, on his way to audit accounts at Bulawayo.
As with Edward Gibbon, every sentence in Waugh has a kind of architectural perfection; as did Gibbon, Waugh knew how to maximize the blunt impact of the monosyllabic word by its well-timed departure from a stream of elegant polysyllables. Waugh strove for economy of expression, such that the structural elements of this prose would each carry as much weight as possible. He frequently compared the writer’s craft to that of a cabinetmaker or carpenter, and saw the joinery of words as an indispensable task of artisanship. In a 1949 letter to Thomas Merton—who had sent him a draft of his book The Waters of Siloe—Waugh criticizes the monk for shirking this chore:
In the non-narrative passages, do you not think you tend to be diffuse, saying the same thing more than once. I noticed this in The Seven Storey Mountain and the fault persists. It is pattern-bombing instead of precision bombing. You scatter a lot of missiles all round the target instead of concentrating on a single direct hit. It is not art. Your monastery tailor and boot-maker would not waste material. Words are our materials.
Waugh loathed the pretense of artists as members of a secular priesthood, and insisted that exalted art did not exist apart from the humble craftsmanship that was a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition of its existence.
The entire essay by Mankowski is worth reading.
Let me select a passage from Decline and Fall that showcases two of the virtues in Waugh’s writing, according to Mankowski: his lucidity and “the concord between the rhythm of the paragraph and its meaning.” This passage occurs after Captain Grimes has escaped Egdon Heath Penal Settlement; his stolen horse has returned, but without the rider. The third-person narrator accesses Paul’s rumination about the apparent immortality of Captain Grimes.
But later, thinking things over as he ate peacefully, one by one, the oysters that had been provided as a ‘relish’ for his supper, Paul knew that Grimes was not dead. Lord Tangent was dead; Mr Prendergast was dead; the time would even come for Paul Pennyfeather; but Grimes, Paul at last realized, was of the immortals. He was a life force. Sentenced to death in Flanders, he popped up in Wales; drowned in Wales, he emerged in South America; engulfed in the dark mystery of Egdon Mire, he would rise again somewhere at some time, shaking from his limbs the musty integuments of the tomb. Surely he had followed in the Bacchic train of distant Arcady, and played on the reeds of myth by forgotten streams, and taught the childish satyrs the art of love? Had he not suffered unscathed the fearful dooms of all the offended gods of all the histories—fire, brimstone and yawning earthquakes, plague and pestilence? Had he not stood, like the Pompeian sentry, while the Citadels of the Plain fell to ruin about his ears? Had he not, like some grease-caked Channel-swimmer, breasted the waves of the Deluge? Had he not moved unseen when darkness covered the waters?
And finally, let me select a passage that showcases a third virtue of Waugh’s writing, according to Mankowski: his “genius for conveying spoken English.” This passage occurs in the “Epilogue” when Earl Peter Pastmaster (formerly Master Peter Beste-Chetwynde) pays his former schoolmaster a visit at Scone College. Executed with pitch-perfect discombobulation, Waugh amusingly captures the dialogue of two characters who have trouble bridging the gap of age, maturity, and sobriety.
Peter Pastmaster came into the room. He was dressed in the bottle-green and white evening coat of the Bollinger Club. His face was flushed and his dark hair slightly disordered.
‘May I come in?’
‘Yes, do.’
‘Have you got a drink?’
‘You seem to have had a good many already.’
‘I’ve had the Boller in my rooms. Noisy lot. Oh, hell! I must have a drink.’
‘There’s some whisky in the cupboard. You’re drinking rather a lot these days, aren’t you, Peter?’
Peter said nothing, but helped himself to some whisky and soda.
‘Feeling a bit ill,’ he said. Then, after a pause, ‘Paul, why have you been cutting me all this time?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t think there was much to be gained by our knowing each other.’
‘Not angry about anything?’
‘No, why should I be?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Peter turned his glass in his hand, staring at it intently. ‘I’ve been rather angry with you, you know.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, I don’t know—about Margot and the man Maltravers and everything.’
‘I don’t think I was much to blame.’
‘No, I suppose not, only you were part of it all.’
‘How’s Margot?’
‘She’s all right—Margot Metroland. D’you mind if I take another drink?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Viscountess Metroland,’ said Peter. ‘What a name. What a man! Still, she’s got Alastair all the time. Metroland doesn’t mind. He’s got what he wanted. I don’t see much of them really. What do you do all the time, Paul?’
‘I’m going to be ordained soon.’
‘Wish I didn’t feel so damned ill. What were we saying? Oh yes, about Metroland. You know, Paul, I think it was a mistake you ever got mixed up with us; don’t you? We’re different somehow. Don’t quite know how. Don’t think that’s rude, do you, Paul?’
‘No, I know exactly what you mean. You’re dynamic, and I’m static.’
‘Is that it? Expect you’re right. Funny thing you used to teach me once; d’you remember? Llanabba—Latin sentences, Quominus and Quin, and the organ; d’you remember?’
‘Yes, I remember,’ said Paul.
‘Funny how things happen. You used to teach me the organ; d’you remember?’
‘Yes, I remember,’ said Paul.
‘And then Margot Metroland wanted to marry you; d’you remember?’
‘Yes,’ said Paul.
‘And then you went to prison, and Alastair—that’s Margot Metroland’s young man—and Metroland—that’s her husband—got you out; d’you remember?’
‘Yes,’ said Paul, ‘I remember.’
‘And here we are talking to one another like this, up here, after all that! Funny, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is rather.’
‘Paul, do you remember a thing you said once at the Ritz—Alastair was there—that’s Margot Metroland’s young man, you know—d’you remember? I was rather tight then too. You said, “Fortune, a much-maligned lady”. D’you remember that?’
‘Yes,’ said Paul, ‘I remember.’
‘Good old Paul! I knew you would. Let’s drink to that now; shall we? How did it go? Damn, I’ve forgotten it. Never mind. I wish I didn’t feel so ill.’
‘You drink too much, Peter.’
‘Oh, damn, what else is there to do? You going to be a clergyman, Paul?’
‘Yes.’
‘Damned funny that. You know you ought never to have got mixed up with me and Metroland. May I have another drink?’
‘Time you went to bed, Peter, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, I suppose it is. Didn’t mind my coming in, did you? After all, you used to teach me the organ; d’you remember? Thanks for the whisky!’
So Peter went out, and Paul settled down again in his chair. So the ascetic Ebionites used to turn towards Jerusalem when they prayed. Paul made a note of it. Quite right to suppress them. Then he turned out the light and went into his bedroom to sleep.
With Decline and Fall under my belt, I look forward to reading other novels by Waugh, including his masterpieces A Handful of Dust (1934) and Brideshead Revisited (1945). Although neglected by readers and critics, I plan to tackle Waugh’s only work of historical fiction, Helena (1950), which he regarded as his personal favorite and which one critic opined is “the book in which Waugh’s religious stance comes to the fore at its best.”
Resources
- BBC Radio 4
- BBC Radio Drama Collection: Evelyn Waugh
- Free Thinking: Evelyn Waugh (45 minutes). A celebration of Evelyn Waugh to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. Matthew Sweet is joined by two writers who are long term admirers – Adam Mars-Jones and Bryony Lavery and by Waugh’s latest biographer, Philip Eade and his grandson and editor, Alexander Waugh.
- Great Lives: Evelyn Waugh (28 minutes). Comedian Russell Kane chooses the author of Scoop and Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh.
- In Our Time: Decline and Fall (42 minutes). David Bradshaw, John Bowen and Ann Pasternak Slater join Melvyn Bragg to discuss Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel Decline and Fall. Set partly in a substandard boys’ public school, the novel is a vivid, often riotous portrait of 1920s Britain. Its themes, including modernity, religion and fashionable society, came to dominate Waugh’s later fiction, but its savage wit and economy of style were entirely new. Published when Waugh was 24, the book was immediately celebrated for its vicious satire and biting humour.
- BBC:
- Face to Face: Evelyn Waugh (22 minutes). John Freeman faced a difficult subject in Evelyn Waugh when he interviewed him in 1960. Waugh, author of Brideshead Revisited, was in characteristically obstructive frame of mind. The result is a rare glimpse into the life and temperament of one of the greatest novelists of this century.
- Critical biography: In First Things, Catholic thinker and writer George Weigel wrote: “For those who want to explore Waugh’s still immensely readable oeuvre, Douglas Lane Patey’s The Life of Evelyn Waugh (Wiley) remains the gold standard.”
- National Review: Micah Mattix, “Evelyn Waugh, Catholic Optimist”
- Crisis: S. A. McCarthy, “The Curmudgeonly Catholic: Three Life Lessons from Evelyn Waugh”
- Catholic Herald: Constance Watson, “Waugh’s Journey to Catholicism“
- National Catholic Register: Joseph Pearce, “Brideshead and Beyond: The Genius of Evelyn Waugh”
- Medium: Wabi Sabi, “Decline and Fall“
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