Evelyn Waugh- the Novelist

By Prof. Jagdish Chandra Jha

English writer Evelyn Waugh was an expert satirist and an accomplished
novelist; Evelyn Waugh was the second son of the late Arthur Waugh,
publisher and literary critic, and brother Alec Waugh, the famous novelist.
He was educated at Lancing and Hertford College, Oxford, where he read
Modern History. In 1927 published his first work, a life of Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, and in 1928 his first novel, Decline, and Fall, which was an
immediate success. He spent the next nine years without abode, traveling
in most parts of Europe, the near east, Africa, and tropical America. In
1939 he was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to
Horse Guards. His best-known books before Brideshead Revisited were A
Handful of Dust, a novel, and Edmund Campion. In 1942 he published
Put Out More Flags, and then in 1945, Brideshead Revisited, When the
Going was Good, The Loved One, Preceded Men at War, which came out
in 1952 as the first volume in the Sword of Honor Trilogy and won the
James Trial Black Prize. The Other Volumes, Officers and Gentlemen, and
Unconditional Surrender were published in 1955 and 1961. In 1964 he
published A little Learning, the first volume of an autobiography. Evelyn
Waugh was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1930, and his
earlier biography of Elizabethan Jesuit Martyr Edmund Campion was
awarded the Hawthorne Prize in 1936.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781663239327

Prof. Jagdish Chandra Jha

Prof Jagdish Chandra Jha has done yeoman’s service to the scholar community of English literature by bringing into print his thesis on Evelyn Waugh, the great novelist, one of the most famous English literature authors. I am Prof. Jha’s younger brother, couldn’t restrain myself from sketching his life as briefly as possible. Prof J. C. Jha was born in 1932 in a small village, Amrita, in a remote district of Saharsa in Bihar (India). The village had no school, not even a primary one. It was mainly inhabited by agricultural laborers, obviously non-literate and poor. Our father was, of course, a lettered man of modern times. He took Jagdish to a village nearby that had a primary school. His brilliance showed up in various fields, both academics, and sports. Eventually, he was selected to study in a renowned school in Bihar. There he passed the matriculation examination with flying colours. With an admirable career in the school, he entered Patna Science College as an undergraduate student. This college was considered, at that time, one of the best in the country for Science teaching. Later he shifted to Patna College, which was famous for Arts teaching. There he pursued English literature. Prof Jha, after completing MA, got appointed in Magadh University of Gaya, the place renowned all over the world for Buddha’s enlightenment. There he taught modern English literature. He became well known as an erudite English scholar and eventually occupied the post of the Head of the English Department. While teaching in the University, Prof Jha completed his research work on Evelyn Waugh, under the guidance of Prof R. K. Sinha, the Head of the English Department of Patna University. Prof Sinha was a scholar of English literature, known far and wide. Having retired from service, Prof Jha still devotes most of his time to study despite being a grand older man of ninety! - Nitiranjan Jha

Book preview

EVELYN WAUGH- THE NOVELIST

Copyright © 2023 Prof. Jagdish Chandra Jha.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-3930-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-3931-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-3932-7 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 02/01/2023

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 The Rootless Generation

Chapter 3 The Conflict of Civilization and Barbarism

Chapter 4 Faith and Fiction

Chapter 5 Later Satirical Novels

Chapter 6 Portrait of the Artist

Chapter 7 The War Trilogy

Chapter 8 Conclusions

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I acknowledge my late wife, Madhuri Devi Jha, who inspired me to complete my Ph.D. and encouraged me throughout my journey. My special thanks to Prof. R.K Sinha for his guidance throughout the Ph.D. program. I’m lucky to have three daughters and two sons. Neerja, my youngest daughter, motivated me to get my Ph.D. thesis on Evelyn Waugh published. Furthermore, many-many thanks to my entire Big family and Friends for their love and for uplifting me daily.

- Prof. Jagdish Chandra Jha

Evelyn Waugh was an author of unusual sensitivity. He could laugh at himself, often unsparingly, and also share the suffering of humanity in its entirety. The book by Dr. J. C. Jha reflects it all with rare brilliance. It is pure bliss for us all that the book would be published soon...

-Krishna & Anil

The book is an insightful and well-crafted depiction of one of the most influential prose stylists of the 20th century. Dr. Jha’s thoughtful review of Evelyn Waugh’s work helps preserve, for posterity, the finest form of human art.

- Jose Rodriguez

My special tribute to my Philosopher, satiric genius, Father Prof. J.C. Jha on his 90th Birthday!!

- Neerja

CHAPTER I

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Introduction

Evelyn Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall, was published in 1928; Unconditional Surrender, the last volume of his war-trilogy, which was also his last novel, appeared in 1961. His career as a novelist covers the most crowded decades of modern history. The social and cultural background, too, as mirrored by his novels, extends from the 1920s to the 1950s. These decades were one of the most turbulent and revolutionary periods in the modern history of England and Europe and his novels vividly express the mood of the time and the spirit of the age; they provide a startling insight into the social and cultural background of the times and link him up with the contemporary situation. It is essential, therefore, for a proper understanding of his novels to take into account the historical, social and intellectual perspective of the period.

The First World War was a great historical catastrophe which marked the end of an era that had begun in the wake of the French Revolution. It was a traumatic event, leading to disintegration of economic, political, social and moral institutions and their codes. In the beginning it had evoked excitement and euphoria, but disenchantment had rapidly set in; and the realisation came that it was the beginning of the great crisis ahead. The war gravely split the landscape of time, making an unbridgeable cleavage between the past and the present. It dissolved well-established boundaries and blew up the familiar landmarks that had been taken for granted. The gulf between the young, who fought in the war, and the old, who stayed at home, widened. All British assumptions about the superiority of their system and the stability of their empire were exposed as illusions. While capitalism was entering a phase of acute crisis, the start of a new system of Socialism appeared on the horizon after the Russian Revolution of 1917. The war emancipated the women and the working-class, and brought on the agenda the urgency of social and political change. It made the motorcar and the aeroplane commonplace. It affected everything and everybody in a revolutionary way and at the end of it nothing was as it had been before. The catastrophe of the First World War not only altered society, it affected men’s sensibilities as they had not previously been affected in modern times. The catastrophe brought into modern society a sense of urgency and a new tempo; it made for a new consciousness of self and of the place of the self in society; it created an atmosphere in which the loss of old certainties, the presence of new anxieties, and the thrusting forward of public issues combined to isolate man from man and group from group. The novelist promptly discovered that new techniques were required to express the new fragmentation of society.¹

The years immediately preceding and following the First World War coincided with great creative experiments and innovations. As Wyndham Lewis says: we were not the only people with something to be proud about at that time. Europe was full of titanic stirrings and snortings – a new art coming to flower to celebrate or to announce a ‘new age’² In 1910 Poger Fry organised the first exhibition at the Grafton Gallery of the post-Impressionist paintings and a second exhibition in 1912 – the earliest organised introduction to the paintings of Van Gogh, Paul Ganguin and Paul Cezanne. The next startling development in arts was Pablo Picasso’s cubism. The first manifesto of Futurism had been issued by F.T. Marinetti in 1909. In 1913 G. Apollinaire published a manifesto called ‘The Futurist Anti-Tradition’ (L’Anti-Tradizione Futurista) in the curt imperative manner already adopted by Marinetti. Expressionism was the German contribution to the world of art. The war-years fostered the emergence of Dadaism and Surrealism. The first manifesto of Vorticism appeared in the first number of Blast in 1914. The phrase, ‘Vorticism’, invented by Ezra Pound, had been taken up by the more militant Wyndham Lewis; and T.E. Hulme, a pupil of Henri Bergson, provided a philosophical background to the movement. Hulme’s concept of ‘a period of hard, dry, classical verse’ encouraged Ezra Pound to initiate another movement in poetry called Imagism and provided a basis for T.S. Eliot’s idea of ‘tradition and individual talent’. Pound and Eliot had already started these daring experiments in verse in the pre-war years, although it was in the post-war period that the culmination occurred in the Cantos and The Waste Land. In fiction James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers were pre-war experiments achieving their fulfilment at the end of the War in Ulysses and Women in Love. Ulysses was a seminal work and led Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein towards further experiments in fiction.

During the 1920s, people of England tried to recover from the shocks and strains of the war, but their attempts, instead, led them to a muddle of escapism, hedonism and cynicism. It was an era of revolt, violence, frivolity, exhibitionism, pervasive skepticism and neuroticism. The cult of ‘youth’ and ‘freedom’, particularly freedom of sexual behaviour, was so widespread and dominating that a very small group of Bright Young People secured a great deal of publicity by throwing wild parties and indulging in outrages and orgies of sex, drinking, ragging and drugging. The younger generation suffered from a sense of loneliness, isolation and aimlessness; for them it was a period of doubt, uncertainty and confusion. Religion was losing its hold on them, creating an atmosphere of moral and psychological perplexity and chaos. As there was nothing stable for an individual outside of himself to hang on to, he drifted into a void of immeasurable dimensions.

The upper classes were losing their supremacy and political dominance; there was a sense of uneasiness and apprehension among them as the lower middle-classes and the working-class were coming up and exerting themselves to share political power. Class distinctions and stratifications were getting blurred due to immense increase in social mobility. Struggle for a status based on education instead of birth became a characteristic feature of the period. The Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression of the late twenties, that led to economic chaos, serious unemployment and poverty, deepened the crisis in Europe as well as in America.

In the intellectual field the works of Marx, Shaw and the Fabians on the one hand, and of Bergson, William James, Freud and Jung, on the other, discovered new ideas or gave new interpretations to existing ideas, exploring unknown regions and explaining the meaning and significance of the contemporary situation. Like the Marxist interpretation revolutionised human thinking in the field of political economy, Freudian interpretation through the study of human psychology of the sub-conscious and unconscious gave a new direction to concepts about human personality and behaviour. Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious added a new dimension to the concept of the myth. All these philosophical, psychological and anthropological discoveries found expression in the daring experimentation in the literature of the twenties – the poetry of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, the novels of D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Ronald Firbank, and the early Evelyn Waugh.

Marcel Proust in France was experimenting in his monumental novel – Ala recherche du temps perdu with a new concept of time and consciousness, based on Bergson and William James that led to a new narrative technique of going forward and backwards in time instead of following a chronological sequence. Joyce’s experiments with the stream-of-consciousness and interior-monologue techniques and the effective exploitation of myth in Ulysses had seminal significance in the development of the novel. It also brought some of the techniques of poetry into prose fiction. The manipulations of symbol, myth and allegory, developed in the novels of Virginia Woolf. Franz Kafka heightened poetic consciousness and enhanced the complexity of the form of fiction in the twenties. But this search for new devices was not a product of the whims of the writers. Rather, it was the result of the break-down of communication between the writer and the people, forcing him to embark upon the voyage for new techniques and values. As David Daiches correctly points out: the heroic age of experiment and expansion in the English novel was thus the product of what might be called a crisis in civilization, not the willful desire to ‘make it new’ and be original for the sake of being original.³

The poetry of T.S. Eliot in general, and his The Waste Land in particular, were the typical and comprehensive expression of the crisis and malaise, of the disintegration and spiritual sterility, of the terror and dilemma, of the twenties. The Waste Land, in addition to being a consummate work of art, was also an invaluable social document, telling more about the spirit of the times than volumes of history and criticism. It was the distillation of the restlessness, the rootlessness, the pessimism, the utter despair, of man alienated and isolated in ‘the waste land’ of a devitalized and mechanized modern civilization. The early novels of Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh were the extension of ‘the waste land’ view of the universe. Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, the title of which has been taken from The Waste Land – I shall show you fear in a handful of dust – was the treatment of the moral and spiritual sterility and futility of the contemporary society.

During the 1930s the crisis of English society deepened further still. There was no abatement of economic chaos and distress; unemployment went on increasing and there were strikes and protest demonstrations of Hunger Marchers on the streets of London. Internationally also the economic and political situations worsened leading to the growth of militant nationalism in many countries. There was the rise of Fascism in Italy, of Nazism in Germany, and the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. With the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, a situation was created which could only lead to a second and more disastrous World War.

The Treaty of Versailles had left a guilt complex in the victor nations and Hitler seemed determined to exploit it to the maximum. The sanctity of the League of Nations was being outrageously violated and the capitalist economy was in doldrums. The experiment of a planned socialist economy in Soviet Russia had been attracting the attention of the people in western Europe; for a large number of people, including poets and writers, Socialism and Marxism became a source of inspiration and also a hope for the future. Many devout Christians and clergymen too became ‘communists’ and regarded communism as a religion of the future. The crisis politicized the people and forced them to take ideological positions. Andre Malraux in France and Ignatio Silone in Italy were positively attracted towards communism. Young English poets like W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice saw the crisis of the thirties as a crisis of transition from capitalism to socialism and sought for its resolution in political terms. They were forced by the situation to take political and ideological sides. The ivory tower had started leaning. In 1930 young men at college were forced to be aware of what was happening in Russia; in Germany; in Italy; in Spain …. They read Marx. They became communists.⁴

The crisis and dilemma of the twenties and thirties had led simultaneously to a trend diametrically opposed and parallel to the trend towards Marxism and Socialism. This trend was manifested in the revival of religion and submission to the authority of the Church as a way out of the spiritual and emotional wasteland of the modern world. People sought for a new meaning, a new faith, a new order, in the teachings and codes of the Church. It became fashionable to be converted to Anglo-Catholicism or Roman Catholicism – T.S. Eliot became Anglo-Catholic; Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Roman Catholic. They asserted the validity of the orthodox teachings of the Church and found in its cumulative wisdom the answers to the ills and woes of the contemporary situation. In religious dogma, they found a measure upon which to base their moral and spiritual awareness. They made the artist conscious that art cannot exist for itself alone; it must serve a religious and spiritual purpose of life. They used teachings of their own religious convictions as the basis of their works and succeeded in creating some of the most outstanding literature of the time.

The circumstances of the 1930s had forced the writers to be aware of their social and historical situation and to reflect a concern for reconstructing society in their creative and critical writings. Thus, the typical literature of this period conveyed a sense of topical urgency, mirroring a feeling of anxiety, tension and the consciousness of crisis and decay. It can be seen now that the political preoccupation of the 1930’s writers were part of a wider movement, though on the surface the direction of this movement was often opposed to one another. The direction might be reactionary or it might be revolutionary, it might be religious or it might be materialist. But its depths were a shift away from personal originality towards points of view accepted by social groups, if not by the whole society.⁵ It was natural that in such a despairing and apocalyptic atmosphere, the dogma of Catholicism and of Marxism emerged as the prime forces in the literature of the period and claimed the loyalty of the writers.

With the advent of the Second World War, the thirties’ movement withered away as the ground on which it was built had shifted after the Russian-German alliance. Disillusioned by this and by the wrong policies of the Soviet leadership at the time, many leftist intellectuals and writers changed their allegiances. W.H. Auden, the leading figure of the group, and Christopher Isherwood went to America. The God they had worshipped had failed Malreaux and Silone, Koestler and Orwell. However, this war did not rouse the romantic-patriotic fervour and enthusiasm as the previous one had done. Rather, it created a new kind of reflectiveness and stoic mood about human destiny.

There was neither a Rupert Brooke nor a Siegfried Sassoon this time. It was that odd, dead period before the Churchillian renaissance, which people called at the time the Great Bore War.⁶ The nature and technique of the war had entirely changed; it had become completely mechanized and devoid of human element. Its destructiveness increased manifold after the manufacture of the atomic weapons, which deepened the anxiety about the survival of the human race and civilization.

The end of the Second World War did not bring with it that relaxation and relief which the First World War I had brought. Though the ‘hot’ war had stopped in August 1945, a decade of ‘cold’ war began, deepening international tension and anxiety. The war had brought many more new problems to the convalescing countries and to England – housing shortage, squalor, rehabilitation of refugees, persecution of political opponents, state interference in private affairs of the individual, bureaucratization of the state machinery, totalitarianism and authoritarianism. If the decade after the Second World War did not show the bright iconoclasm of the decade after the First, and if there is nothing to-day quite like the despairing wit of Chroma Yellow or Antic Hay, there is, nevertheless, less optimism about human nature, and political institutions, than there was in 1930s: a restrained and reasonably cheerful way skepticism about the possibilities of man and his works is one mark of the early 1950s.⁷

One very significant outcome of the Second World War, apart from the defeat of Fascism and Nazism in Europe, was the disappearance of English imperialism from Asia and Africa and its relegation to a secondary position in world politics, which it had dominated for the last hundred years. England was reduced to a small metropolitan country, shorn of its past glamour and power, and made dependent for its economic and political existence on America, the European Community Market and the Commonwealth. After the war, a Labour Government had come into power and the concept of a Welfare State was brought into practice. The socialization of Health Service and certain basic industries, the enforcement of income-tax system to prevent concentration of wealth in certain hands, and the implementation of comprehensive social- welfare programmes led not only to a partial breakdown of the class system, but also to a corresponding strengthening of the bureaucracy, which changed and influenced the life of every Englishman. The immediate result of these social changes on the post-war English novel was the displacement of the well-to-do and aristocratic university men in the novels of Forster, Huxley, Powell and Waugh, by heroes with humbler origin in the novels of Greene, Amis, Snow and Wain.

Aldous Huxley’s post-war novel Ape and Essence envisaged a world of the future devastated by atomic warfare. George Orwell’s 1984, a product of ‘cold-war’ fever, warned against the tragic consequences of totalitarianism. Koestler’s The Age of Longing is another analysis of the cold-war, revealing the ‘yogi’ and the ‘commissar’ in conflict over the decaying body of liberalism. In The Quiet American, Graham Greene depicted the dilemma, tension and anxiety, of the individual in the ‘cold-war’ situation of the post-war world. Evelyn Waugh presented his response to the war and the post-war situation in his satires Scott-King’s Modern Europe and Love Among the Ruins, and finally in his war-trilogy, Sword of Honour.

The fifties brought into prominence a new group of younger novelists, the so-called ‘Angry Young Men’ that included writers like Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson and John Wain who most clearly reflected the mood of the post-war years. They rejected the experimental and avant-garde forms and returned to more traditional styles. Lucky Jim by Amis, which became the most popular novel of the period, was a satire on the political and cultural

Reviews for Evelyn Waugh- the Novelist

[Neerja Jha · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a fantastic book of the 20th century! An award-winning book!! All must read it; a tremendous scholarly book!! Don't miss it!! The author is so Brilliant!!