Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Evelyn Waugh (1)

Evelyn Waugh died on Easter Sunday, 10 April 1966, at the age of sixty-three. I was at boarding school and had just turned fourteen but I remember the occasion of his death. One of the more rebellious intellectuals in the sixth form had pinned a notice to the main notice board deploring the fact that the philistine school authorities had made not a single announcement, had urged not a solitary act of remembrance, about the passing away of one of the greatest English novelists. This ardent Waugh fan urged that individual boys make donations so that flowers could be sent to the family. A small list of names, with modest sums of money beside them, was scrawled below. I don’t know whether some bouquet or other eventually made its way from the school to Waugh’s home in Somerset — but I do remember pointedly logging away the unfamiliar name of this author. Evelyn Waugh? … Wonder if he’s any good?

Thirty-five years later I now know the answer to that question but I could never have foreseen just how intense my relationship with the works and the man would become. Its latest manifestation is the four-hour adaptation of Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy and for which I wrote the script. This is the second time I have adapted Waugh’s work for the screen. The first was Scoop, a two-hour film for LWT, made in 1987. In 1982 I was TV critic for the New Statesman and wrote at length about John Mortimer’s epic adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. But by then the embroilment was well underway: I had read all the novels, of course, and had even taught them to undergraduates at Oxford. I had started searching second-hand bookshops for first editions. My Waugh obsession was fully developed.

Waugh, more than any of his peers, provokes this level of interest. The obvious reason for this is that the works endure so well and provide such great rewards. But the other explanation must be that we know so much about the man himself. I own four biographies, not to mention several other memoirs by family, friends and acquaintances. The juvenilia have been published and so have the travel books and the complete journalism; then there are the notorious journals and the collected letters and other additional volumes of correspondence between Waugh and Nancy Mitford, Waugh and Diana Cooper. Almost every public and private word the man wrote has been published and he’s not been dead forty years — we have all the information on Evelyn Waugh we could possibly want.

And this is what informs and charges our reading. Waugh is the most autobiographical of writers — even the grotesque and outlandish comedies—Vile Bodies, Black Mischief—are solidly rooted in the details of his life. This tendency to recycle his own experience is nowhere more evident than the trilogy of novels Waugh wrote about the Second World War—Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961) — which he collected together, somewhat revised, under the general title of Sword of Honour, first published in a single volume in 1965.

The central figure of the trilogy is Guy Crouchback who, at the outbreak of war in 1939, is thirty-five years old, almost the same age as Waugh at the time. There all similarity breaks down: Guy is, in effect, an almost fantasy alter ego for the author — a cradle Catholic from an ancient aristocratic family, an independently wealthy single man living in Italy. Everything, so the uncharitable view would go, that Waugh himself aspired to and yearned for in his life.

But the course that Guy Crouchback’s war follows is, in almost every degree, that of Waugh’s. Waugh eventually managed to secure a commission in the Marines and was later transferred to the Commandos. The glamorous resonance of these names belies the mundanity and relentless frustration of Waugh’s military experience. Like Guy, Waugh’s first brush with action was a mission to Dakar in West Africa. Then in 1941 he was sent to Crete with the Commandos to try and repel the German invasion, just managing to escape before the British forces surrendered. Then, after a period of inactivity (during which he wrote Brideshead Revisited), Waugh was dispatched to Yugoslavia in 1944 to be part of a military mission liaising with Tito’s partisans.

Waugh was hugely discontented as a soldier. He was a brave man (quite fearless under fire during the Crete debacle) but he was difficult and unpopular. No commanding officer wanted Waugh in his force and he was routinely shunted from command to command as patience ran out and tempers erupted. He was rude and truculent: a wealthy and famous novelist, he was a malign and prickly presence in the officers’ mess. I remember once meeting Fitzroy Maclean — with whom Waugh served in Yugoslavia — and I asked him what he thought of Waugh. Maclean said he had never known an officer more loathed and detested by the men who served under him. Maclean and Waugh cordially disliked each other so the opinion has to be treated with some caution. But, after Crete, Waugh’s disillusion with the army and its values was profound.

The section of Sword of Honour that deals with Crete is a magnificent and chilling tour de force. As a chronicle of military incompetence and absurdity it rivals Catch 22 as a bitter indictment of men at war. It is also a fascinating example of Waugh’s method, of how he turned his experience into fiction.

Waugh, like Guy Crouchback, arrived in Crete as the British and Empire forces were in full and shambolic retreat from the invading German army. The Commandos were ordered to provide the rearguard to protect the embarking men on the beach head. Under almost constant air attack somehow large numbers of the army were taken off by the navy. Waugh and the Commandos watched with alarm. As the clock ticked down it was apparent that there was not enough room on the boats and many would have to surrender.

Waugh’s commanding officer — whom he revered — Colonel Robert Laycock, dictated a false statement and had Waugh write in the war diary that he had ordered his men to evacuate Crete, “in view of the fact that …there was no enemy contact.” This was patently false: serious fighting was still going on in the hills, but Laycock ordered his men to abandon the rearguard positions, embark and thereby escape. After their departure many hundreds of soldiers were captured by the Germans. Waugh was complicit in this blatant disregard of orders and he felt the shame deeply, talking of “my ignominious flight,” and “my bunk from Crete.”

In the novel everything is subtly different. First, the character based on Laycock — Colonel Tommy Blackhouse — conveniently breaks his leg on a destroyer approaching Crete and never even lands on the island. Instead the man who ignominiously flees is the idealized, aristocratic warrior, Ivor Claire, whom Guy idolizes. Guy refuses to disobey orders and escapes in a small boat rather than surrender. But learning later of Ivor Claire’s desertion brings about Guy’s potent disillusion with the army. Ivor Claire bears all the guilt that Waugh felt himself at his duplicitous escape from Crete. Guy behaves with honour throughout but, when he learns of Ivor’s cowardice, his love affair with the army and all things military is effectively over.

As always with Waugh, he was brutally honest with himself. When Officers and Gentlemen was first published Guy’s last day on Crete is described as “fatal”—the day on which he resigned “an immeasurable piece of his manhood.” This makes no sense: Guy has done nothing wrong, but the words represent the true measure of Waugh’s own feelings about the incident. The sentence was excised from the later omnibus edition.

When Officers and Gentlemen was published (dedicated to Laycock) Waugh’s inner circle knew the facts. Ann Fleming, a close friend, waspishly telegrammed to Waugh “Presume Ivor Claire based Laycock dedication ironical.” Waugh denied this absolutely: “if you suggest such a thing anywhere,” he wrote back, “it will be the end of our beautiful friendship … Just shut up about Laycock. Fuck you. E. Waugh.”

The autobiographical facts — and Waugh’s personal agony — underpin the fiction and explain its particular power and vehemence. Guy Crouch-back, like Waugh, wanted to go to war — it was a just war and he was zealous for battle — but everything he experienced resulted in bitter disillusion and disappointment.

It is this element in Waugh — his fundamental and unsparing honesty — that I find so compelling and admirable. The various poses and images of himself that Waugh presented to the world were deliberately provocative, not to say deliberately preposterous. Whether he is acting the choleric Tory squire, or the Victorian paterfamilias, or the Pall Mall clubman; whether he is expounding on his hatred of all things modern or displaying his near-manic adherence to the Catholic Church and the aristocratic values of county house life — almost everything is calculated to challenge and offend, to draw down, it would seem, the inevitable accusations of social-climbing, class-hatred, snobbery and affectation.

But nobody was more aware of the sham and the bogus than Waugh. His late self-portrait in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold proves beyond doubt that he knew himself better than anyone. And the same unblinking candour informs his dark, comic vision also. He saw the world and its denizens with absolute clarity and devastating unsentimentality — nowhere more so than in Sword of Honour—and displayed the nature of the human condition with almost gleeful ruthlessness. This is what makes him, I think, an enduringly modern spirit — however paradoxical that adjective might seem — and explains why his books have lasted so well and will continue to survive.

2001