Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Evelyn Waugh (3) (Review of Collected Travel Writing)

It is 1959, you are a retired brigadier living in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika. A friend of yours, a colonial officer, has offered to drive you up country to Morogoro. But when your friend arrives he is already accompanied by a stranger: a stout, elderly man named Evelyn Waugh. You have a long day’s journey ahead of you. In his book, published a year later, A Tourist in Africa, Waugh describes you as a man of “imperturbable geniality” and adds of his two travelling companions, “I don’t know if they enjoyed my company. I certainly enjoyed theirs.” I wonder… How one would love to know what the retired brigadier really thought.

I mention this tiny incident because one of the experiences of reading Waugh’s travel writing is that I constantly speculate what it must have been like actually to meet him while he was on the road, as it were. It strikes me that a day in a hot car driving through the African bush with Evelyn Waugh could well qualify as a minor circle of hell. He was not a tolerant or easy man, that much is clear, but he also had a weak grasp of how he himself was perceived. He was genuinely traumatized after a visit to the Caribbean to discover that his hosts thought him “a bore.” I remember once meeting Fitzroy Maclean — and there was little love lost between him and Waugh — and asking him what Waugh had been like when they knew each other during the war. Maclean said, with candour — and no axe to grind, as far as I could tell — that he had never, in his entire military career, met an officer so loathed by the men who served under him.

One of the reasons why one tries to imagine an encounter with Waugh on his trips abroad is that he seemed always to be travelling under duress of one sort or another. And such duress is not conducive to congeniality: there never appears to be any real enthusiasm for the journey or curiosity about the places and people he will discover. You are left with the impression that he was more or less permanently disgruntled, quick to complain, a moan always on his lips, the spectre of terrible boredom forever hovering at his shoulder.

As Nicholas Shakespeare makes clear in his excellent introduction to this omnibus, Waugh’s travel writing was, in the pure sense, hack work. Waugh wrote travel books for the money and, later in life, also undertook assignments to escape the severities of the English winter. Waugh was completely open about this: even in his first volume, Labels, he advertised the ulterior motives of the enterprise, and it is not surprising that his travel writing is redolent of the dutiful task and the looming deadline. It rarely shines.

Mind you, if one was to be honest, one would have to confess that as a genre travel writing — at book length — with a few notable exceptions, makes tedious reading. Shakespeare is all too well aware of Waugh’s shortcomings but makes the valid point that the seven travel books in this collection form a kind of covert autobiography. We receive opinions, discover attitudes and prejudices that are unadulterated by fiction: we are permitted a direct glimpse of the man. And it’s a good point to make, but Waugh, it seems to me, always adopted a mask when he wrote a travel book and the comments and reflections often appear on closer examination to be disingenuous or assumed. I’m not so sure we uncover the truth or learn much more about this difficult and hugely complex man.

I had read all these books before but thought it might be a useful exercise to reread the first and last of his travel writings—Labels (published 1930) and A Tourist in Africa (1960) — to see what differences there were between the young man, recently published and recently married, and the prematurely old, eminent writer, full of cafard and taedium vi-tae, looking at the world with a carefully cultivated jaundiced eye. Labels has always been the most interesting of Waugh’s travel books because it witnessed and was written as his first marriage collapsed. When you know the facts behind the book it appears almost as a fiction: Waugh, the narrator, looks on at himself and his wife Evelyn, thinly disguised as travelling companions, posing as a detached and disinterested observer. Little of the acute misery he was suffering as he wrote it is obviously present, except for the final paragraph, and it has, like all his travel books, an air of hoops being doggedly jumped through. The pages on Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona would challenge the most soporific guidebook.

In A Tourist in Africa Waugh, in his mid fifties, is now playing the part of the choleric, aged author. He can barely bestir himself to make any effort to engage our interest, spending pages, for example, summarizing books he has read on the voyage out to Mombasa. Occasionally you sense his spirits rise such as when, in Dar es Salaam, he comes across a man calling himself Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson, an American madman who was travelling the world crowning himself king of every country he found himself in. For a couple of pages the book turns into pure Waugh: the wholly relished black humour, the refusal to judge or comment, the clinical description of total absurdity. But such occasions are rare.

Even the fabled style slips. Labels is far more garrulous than mature Waugh, almost chatty, which is not surprising given the author’s age. A Tourist in Africa is interesting insofar as it shows the Augustan verities of his writing turning decadent: the matchless prose becoming slack and pompous: “For me a voyage is the time to read about the places for which I am bound and to study the bestsellers of the past year. I got through two books a day and never found myself without something readable.” Clichés (“breakneck speed”) and the use of the same adjective in the same line are sure signs of his lack of energy and interest, not even picked up at proof stage: “Over great areas the tsetse fly keeps man away. The great European settlement,” etc.

Waugh had little respect for his travel writing but Nicholas Shakespeare is right to claim that there are flashes of insight. Talking about Cecil Rhodes, Waugh contrasts the lives of the politician and the artist: the politician “fading into a mist of disappointment and controversy,” the artist “leaving a few objects of permanent value that were not there before him and would not have been there but for him.” This is very close to a personal credo, in fact: this was how Waugh saw himself and is both an exalted and humble definition of what a genuine artist hopes to achieve. Spontaneously addressing a school in Rhodesia he says he has been studying the wonders of the English language for over fifty years and every day still has recourse to a dictionary. There are nuggets of gold in these overworked seams but they are hard to find.

However there is one link between the first and last of these travel books that does resonate. When Waugh wrote Labels he had been cuckolded and was contemplating the impending and very public shame of his divorce. That personal hurt comes to the surface at the end of the book as his boat moves slowly up the Thames to its berth: “I woke up several times in the night to hear the horn again … It was a very dismal sound, premonitory, perhaps of coming trouble, for Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be happy for very long.” Bleak words from a twenty-six-year-old who has just seen his world collapse. But the end of A Tourist in Africa sees a similar bitter envoi as he leaves the continent: “Cruelty and injustice are endemic everywhere.” It was while Waugh was away from home writing Labels that his wife betrayed him. And I have always thought, myself, that the collapse of Waugh’s first marriage was the determining event in his life, that this cataclysm shaped him in one way or another for the rest of his days. The saddened, humiliated young man of Labels is maybe not so far removed from the posturing clubman roving round Africa. Perhaps that helps explain why there is always something joyless in Waugh’s travels.

2003