Reliable Essays Page 10

  Lurking in double focus behind those thick specs is a star student who could have been scholarly over any range he chose. But what he chose was to narrow the field of vision: narrow it to deepen it. He isn’t exactly telling us to Buy British, but there can be no doubt that he attaches little meaning to the idea of internationalism in the arts. All too vague, too unpindownable, too disrupting of the connections between literature and the life of the nation.

  Betjeman was the young Larkin’s idea of a modern poet because Betjeman, while thinking nothing of modern art, actually got in all the facts of modern life. Like all good critics Larkin quotes from a writer almost as creatively as the writer writes, and the way he quotes from Summoned by Bells traces Betjeman’s power of evocation to its source, in memory. The Betjeman/Piper guidebooks, in which past and present were made contemporaneous through being observed by the same selectively loving eye, looked the way Larkin’s poetry was later to sound – packed with clear images of a crumbling reality, a coherent framework in which England fell apart. An impulse to preserve which thrived on loss.

  In Required Writing the Impulse to Preserve is mentioned often. Larkin the critic, like Larkin the librarian, is a keeper of English literature. Perhaps the librarian is obliged to accession more than a few modern books which the critic would be inclined to turf out, but here again duty has triumphed. As for loss, Larkin the loser is here too (‘deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth’) but it becomes clearer all the time that he had the whole event won from the start.

  Whether he spotted the daffodil-like properties of deprivation, and so arranged matters that he got more of it, is a complicated question, of the kind which his critical prose, however often it parades a strict simplicity, is equipped to tackle. Subtle, supple, craftily at ease, it is on a par with his poetry – which is just about as high as praise can go. Required Writing would be a treasure-house even if every second page were printed upside-down. Lacking the technology to accomplish this, the publishers have issued the book in paperback only, with no index, as if to prove that no matter how self-effacing its author might be, they can be even more so on his behalf.

  Observer, 25 November, 1983: previously included in Snakecharmers in Texas, 1988

  Postscript

  To track the closing stages of Larkin’s career was among the delights of being a literary critic in the late twentieth century, but the pleasure was not unmixed. Larkin’s poetry was, and will always remain, too self-explanatory to require much commentary. Puzzle poems like ‘Sympathy in White Major’ were few, and on the whole his work made a point of declining in advance all offers of academic assistance. So in praising his accomplishment there was always a risk of drawing attention to the obvious. After I tentatively suggested in print that the source of illumination in the central panel of the ‘Leavings’ triptych might be a lighthouse, Craig Raine thrust his impatient face very close to mine and hairily hissed: ‘Of course it’s a lighthouse!’ And of course it was. It’s all there in the poem, if you look hard enough: and no one else’s poetry ever so invited you to look hard and look again.

  There was edifying fun to be had, however, in pointing out how Larkin’s incidental prose was of a piece with his verse. As a device for self-protection, Larkin was fond of proclaiming his loneliness, misery and bristling insularity, but his prose is there to prove his generous and unprejudiced response to the spontaneous joys of life. With T. S. Eliot, the essay on Marie Lloyd is a one-off: clearly he loved the music hall, but he never contemplated allowing the instinctive vigour of popular culture to climb far beyond the upper basement of his hierarchical aesthetic. Larkin never contemplated anything else. His poem about Sidney Bechet saluted the great saxophonist not just as a master, but as his master. For Larkin, pre-modern jazz was the measure of all things: he wanted his poetry to be as appreciable as that. His touchstone for the arts lay in what came to be called the Black Experience.

  Helping to make this clear turned out to be useful work, because after his death the scolds moved in. They wanted to dismiss him as a racist, and might have carried the day if a body of sane opinion had not already been in existence. He was also execrated as a provincial, a misogynist and a pornophile. He was none of those things except by his own untrustworthy avowal, usually framed in the deliberately shocking language he deployed in his letters for the private entertainment of his unshockable friends. In his everyday behaviour he did the best a naturally diffident man can to be courteous, responsible and civilized at all times, and in his poetry he did even better than that. In no Larkin poem is there an insensitive remark that is not supplied with its necessary nuances by another poem. To believe Larkin really meant that ‘Books are a load of crap’ you yourself have to believe that books are a load of crap. The arts pages are nowadays stiff with people who do believe that, even if they think they believe otherwise: all they really care about is the movies. There are people reviewing books, even reviewing poetry, who can read only with difficulty, and begrudge the effort. No writer, alive or dead, is any longer safe from the fumbling attentions of the semiliterate literatus. But here again, the exponential proliferation of bad criticism can scarcely deprive the good critic of a role – quite the contrary. There has to be someone to save what ought to be obvious from the mudslide of obfuscation, if only by asking such childishly elementary questions as: if you can’t see that it took Larkin’s personality to produce Larkin’s poetry, what can you see? And if you can’t accept Larkin’s poetry as a self-sustaining literary achievement, what are you doing putting pen to paper?

  2001

  EVELYN WAUGH’S LAST STAND

  The Letters of Evelyn Waugh edited by Mark Amory, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  Unless the telephone is uninvented, this will probably be the last collection of letters by a great writer to be also a great collection of letters. It could be argued that the book should have been either much shorter, so as to be easily assimilable, or else much larger, so as to take in all of the vast number of letters Waugh wrote, but even at this awkward length it is a wonderfully entertaining volume – even more so, in fact, than the Diaries. Here is yet one more reason to thank Evelyn Waugh for his hatred of the modern world. If he had not loathed the telephone, he might have talked all this away.

  ‘Would you say I was a very ill-tempered and self-infatuated man?’ he asked Nancy Mitford in 1947, and added, answering his own question: ‘It hurts.’ Waugh was unhappy about himself, and on this evidence he had every right to be. People who want to emphasize his repellent aspects will find plenty to help them here. For one thing, he revelled in his contempt for Jews. In his correspondence he usually spelled the word Jew with a small ‘j’ unless he was being polite to one of them for some professional reason. In a 1946 letter to Robert Henriques he asks for information about the Wandering Jew to help him in writing Helena. ‘Please forgive me for pestering you in this way. You are the only religious Jew of my acquaintance.’ In the letter to Nancy Mitford printed immediately afterwards, the Jews are back in lower case. ‘I have just read an essay by a jew [Arthur Koestler] which explains the Mitford sobriety and other very peculiar manifestations of the family.’ If there was ever anything playfully outrageous about this behaviour the charm has long since fled.

  But when your stomach has finished turning over it is worth considering that Waugh was equally nasty about any other social, racial, or ethnic group except what he considered to be pure-bred, strait-laced, upper-class Catholic English. In addition to yids, the book is stiff with frogs, dagoes, Huns, coons, chinks, niggers, and buggers. Of necessity Waugh numbered not a few homosexuals among his acquaintances, but it should also be remembered that he knew some Jews too, and that they, like the homosexuals, seem to have been willing enough to put up with his jibes. In other words they drew a line between the essential Evelyn Waugh and the Evelyn Waugh who was a hotbed of prejudice. It wouldn’t hurt us to do the same. Waugh was far too conservative to be an anti-Semite of the Nazi stamp. When he carried on as if th
e Holocaust had never happened, he wasn’t ignoring its significance, he was ignoring it altogether. He wasn’t about to modify his opinions just because the Huns had wiped out a few yids.

  At the end of the Sword of Honour trilogy anti-Semitism is specifically identified as a scourge. The whole closing scene of the third book can confidently be recommended for perusal by anyone who doubts Waugh’s emotional range. Anti-Semitism is also one of the things that Gilbert Pinfold finds poisonous about his own mind. Waugh was perfectly capable of seeing that to go on indulging himself in anti-Semitism even after World War Two was tantamount to endorsing a ruinously irrational historical force. But Waugh, with a sort of cantankerous heroism, refused to let the modern era define him. He retained his creative right to interpret events in terms of past principles nobody else considered relevant. When the facts refused to sit, they were simply ignored. (It is remarkable, however, how many of them did sit. Rereading his work, one is continually struck by how much he got right. He guessed well in advance, for example, that the Jews would not necessarily be much better liked by the Communists than they had been by the Nazis.)

  Behaving as if recent history wasn’t actually happening was one of Waugh’s abiding characteristics. It is the main reason why his books always seem so fresh. Since he never fell for any transient political belief, he never dates. In the 1930s, far from not having been a Communist, he wasn’t even a democrat. He believed in a stratified social order and a universal Church, the one nourishing the other. The stratified social order was already crumbling before he was born and the universal Church had disappeared during the reign of Henry VIII. His ideal was largely a fantasy. But it was a rich fantasy, traditionally based. Sustained by it, he could see modern life not just sharply but in perspective. When people say that Waugh was more than just a satirist, they really mean that his satire was coherent. It takes detachment to be so comprehensive.

  Waugh seems to have been born with his world view already intact. Even for an English public school boy he sounds unusually mature. The social side of his personality was all set to go. What he had to do was make the facts fit it, since he was neither well off nor particularly well born. In view of these circumstances it is remarkable that he rarely sounds like a parvenu – just like someone waiting to come into his inheritance. If he had not been a writer he might never have made it, but there was no doubt about that side of his personality either. While still at school he was interested in the technicalities of writing and already capable of the first-class practical criticism which he lavished free of charge on his friends’ manuscripts throughout his life. At Oxford he was awarded a gentleman’s Third but this should not be taken to mean that he was a bad student. He was merely an original one, who absorbed a wide knowledge of history, literature, and the fine arts without appearing to try. As he told Nancy Mitford a long time later, it takes a knowledge of anatomy to draw a clothed figure. Waugh’s mind was well stocked.

  ‘I liked the rich people parts less than the poor,’ he wrote to Henry Yorke (‘Henry Green’) about Yorke’s early novel Living. This was probably a comment about accuracy, or the lack of it. Waugh’s preference for the upper classes did not preclude his noting how the lower orders behaved and spoke. Falling for the Plunket Greenes and the Lygon sisters, Waugh was soon able to satisfy his craving for smart company. It would be easy to paint him as an arriviste, but really the success he enjoyed at one level of society seems to have sharpened his response to all the other levels. He didn’t shut himself off. One of the enduringly daunting things about Waugh’s early satirical novels is the completeness with which they reproduce the social setting. Those rural types at the end of Scoop, for example, are not caricatures. Waugh took a lot in. His pop eyes missed nothing. He narrowed his mind in order to widen his gaze.

  The misery he was plunged into when his first wife left him still comes through. In the pit of despair he finished writing Vile Bodies, which remains one of the funniest books in the world. The connection between work and life is not to be glibly analysed in the case of any artist and least of all in Waugh’s. ‘It has been infinitely difficult,’ he told Henry Yorke, ‘and is certainly the last time I shall try to make a book about sophisticated people.’ This is a salutary reminder that he didn’t necessarily like the Bright Young Things – he just found them interesting.

  Asking whether Evelyn Waugh was a snob is like asking whether Genghis Khan was an authoritarian. The question turns on what kind of snob, and the first answer is – open and dedicated. During the war he was horrified to find himself sharing the mess with officers of plebeian background, ‘like young corporals’. (In the Sword of Honour trilogy Guy Crouchback puts up stoically with such affronts. In real life Waugh was probably less patient.) He was under the impression that no Australian, however well educated, would be able to tell a real Tudor building from a false one. (Lack of background.) He doubted whether Proust (‘Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective’) ever really penetrated to the inner circles of French society: as a Jew, or jew, all Proust could have met was ‘the looser aristocracy’.

  In a 1952 letter to Nancy Mitford, Waugh is to be heard complaining about the unsmart company he had been forced to keep at dinner the previous evening. The guests had included Sir Laurence Olivier (as he then was) and Sir Frederick Ashton (as he later became). Apparently Waugh had complained to his hostess that ‘the upper classes had all left London’. Ashton was referred to as ‘a most unarmigerous dancer called Ashton’. Waugh had started off being pretty unarmigerous himself, but by dint of genealogical research had managed to come up with a few quarterings – a feat which he was untypically bashful enough to dismiss as having been performed ‘for the children’. Unlike Ashton’s, Waugh’s own knighthood was destined never to come through, probably because he turned down the CBE. In Britain, if you want high honours, it is wise to accept the low ones when they are offered.

  Such a blunder helps to demonstrate that Waugh, if he calculated, did not calculate very well. In this he differed from the true climber, whose whole ability is never to put a foot wrong. Waugh put a foot wrong every day of the week. Quite often he put the foot in his mouth. He was always offending his high-class acquaintances by being more royalist than the King. The best of them forgave him because they thought he was an important artist and because they liked him better than he liked himself. Most of them belonged to that looser aristocracy which Waugh mistakenly believed Proust had been confined to. In Britain, those aristocrats with genuine artistic interests form a very particular stratum. Waugh idealized the philistine landed gentry but his friends, many of whom came from just such a background, did not make the same mistake. In a 1945 letter quoted here in a footnote, Lady Pansy Lamb told Waugh that Brides-head Revisited was a fantasy. ‘You see English Society of the 20s as something baroque and magnificent on its last legs . . . I fled from it because it seemed prosperous, bourgeois and practical and I believe it still is . . .’

  But for Waugh it was a necessary fantasy. He thought that with no social order there could be no moral order. People had to know their place before they could see their duty. In both life and art he needed a coherent social system. His version of noblesse oblige was positively chivalric. Because Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff-Gordon escaped from the Titanic in an underloaded boat, Waugh was still jeering at them a quarter of a century later. In Sword of Honour the fact that Ivor has behaved badly on Crete is one of the longest and strongest moral threads in the story. Mrs Stitch is brought back from the early novels for the specific purpose of taking pity on him in his shame.

  Waugh himself had a disappointing time in the army. The head of the special force in which he hoped to distinguish himself in battle regarded him as unemployable and left him behind. In Sword of Honour Waugh presents himself, through Guy Crouchback, as a man misunderstood. Ford Madox Ford performed the same service for himself through Christopher Tietjens in Parade’s End. In fact Waugh, like Ford, had probably been understood. He was simply too fantastic to have aro
und. But the code of conduct which he so intractably expressed in real life lives on in his books as a permanently illuminating ethical vision. There is something to it, after all.

  Snobbery was also Waugh’s way of being humble about his art. His paragons were Mrs Stitch and Lady Circumference, both of whom could do the right thing through sheer breeding. Lady Circumference’s unswerving philistinism he explicitly regarded as a virtue rather than a vice. He thought more of aristocrats than of artists. This viewpoint had its limitations but at least it saved him from the folly of imagining that behaviour could be much influenced by intellectual fashions and left him free to spot the inevitable gap between people’s characters and their political beliefs.

  His Catholicism was another thing that kept him humble: saints, he pointed out, attach no importance to art. Not that he ever took a utilitarian view of his faith. Waugh believed that Sir John Betjeman’s Anglicanism was essentially self-serving and took frequent opportunities to tell him so, with the result that their friendship was almost ruined. For Waugh, Catholicism’s uncompromising theology was an enticement. Just as he was more royalist than the King, he was more Catholic than the Pope. He was a convert who berated born Catholics for their moral lapses. When Clarissa Churchill married Sir Anthony Eden, Waugh abused her for her apostasy – Eden was a divorced man. The Church’s eternal strictness was Waugh’s comfort. On the Church’s behalf he welcomed new converts among his friends with the promise of a bed turned down and a place at the eternal table. Even more than the English social hierarchy, which in his heart of hearts he knew was a shifting structure, the Church was his bulwark against the modern world. Hence his unfeigned despair at the introduction of a vernacular liturgy. ‘The Vatican Council’, he wrote to Lady Mosley in 1966, a month before his death, ‘has knocked the guts out of me.’