Vol. 7 No. 11 · 20 June 1985
pages 3-6 | 5719 words
Noël Annan places Evelyn Waugh among the deviants of mid-century England
It should now be generally agreed except possibly in the Fens that Evelyn Waugh was the greatest English novelist of his generation. Certainly Graham Greene, Henry Green and Angus Wilson thought so, although they and not he won the worldly honours Waugh would dearly have loved. On the other hand, that redoubtable holder of the Order of Merit, J.B. Priestley, did not think so. But then whom would he have nominated? Orwell, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett? Or conceivably ... himself? Waugh has even proved exportable to America: Brides-head Revisited was the most popular series ever shown on American public-service television. Still, his former admirer Edmund Wilson was revolted by that book, and American intellectuals have never put him beside Faulkner, Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald. And on the Continent there is no translation of Waugh as audacious as Avanti Jeeves.
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 7 No. 13 · 18 July 1985
From Alan Sinfield
SIR: Noel Annan’s assertion that Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Augustinianism’ made him ‘a deviant’ (LRB, 20 June) is very surprising. The views he attributes to Waugh – that ‘men’ can’t ‘change things for the better’ and that ‘progressives, reformers, liberals and socialists’ are misguided and probably harmful – are surely close to those of most 20th-century English writers who have been celebrated as of high literary stature. In 1916 T.E. Hulme endorsed the ‘system of ideas you find in Sorel, the classical, pessimistic, or, as its opponents would have it, the reactionary ideology’, embracing ‘the conviction that man is by nature bad or limited, and can consequently only accomplish anything of value by disciplines, ethical, heroic or political. In other words, it believes in Original Sin’ (and making the trains run on time).
This outlook is explicit or implicit in most English Modernist writing, running through to ‘theatre of the absurd’. Novelists like Graham Greene, Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch and Anthony Burgess also return repeatedly to the issue, often tending towards the ‘Augustinian’ view. Nigel Lawson even derives the idea from Shakespeare: ‘Shakespeare was a Tory, without any doubt … I am not a great believer in progress … man’s nature doesn’t change. The same problems are there in different forms’ (and he means to keep it that way).
Waugh’s hostility to attempts to improve the conditions of the vast majority of people, so that they might approach those in which he and his friends lived, was far from deviant. What is unusual, and for this we should read and appreciate the novels, is the frankness with which Waugh acknowledges the social and political implications of his credo. They should have served as warning against Nigel Lawson.
Alan Sinfield
School of English and American Studies,
