Against Emotion in Literature: The Case of Evelyn Waugh

1‘On firm intellectual convictions but with little emotion (my emphasis) I was admitted into the Roman Catholic church.’ ‘A work of art is not a matter of... experiencing tender emotions..., but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline.’1

2I will discuss here the relation between emotion and the impersonal in contemporary British literature and, particularly, in relation with the so-called modernist movement. In the first half of the twentieth century, rejecting the sentimental values of a bygone Victorian age, modernist authors, Virginia Woolf and her followers, attempted to erase from their works all traces of personal feelings while they focused on ephemeral, ineffable ‘moments of being’ which, in the intensity of experience that they recorded, exuded intense emotions for their characters and readers.

3Now, for us Frenchmen, the English are a phlegmatic race, they curb their passions, they mask their feelings, they stifle their emotions. In short they are enigmatic and, presumably, hardly human. By our standards, Evelyn Waugh, whose centenary we are celebrating, is an Englishman, ergo (if we follow the preceding generalities) he was phlegmatic and we shall try to prove that, in his early novels at least, he strove to keep emotion at bay. Such a simplification, indeed, goes against all we know of his petulant, cantankerous, curmudgeonly personality but is by no means untrue of his early art and fiction. Waugh may be English, he may have attempted to eliminate all traces of personal feelings from his fiction, but he loathed Bloomsbury and a certain form of modernism. He is also a satirist and, what’s more, a Roman-Catholic writer. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift he eschewed a humour close to sympathy and adopted, as a dominant tone, a scathing wit and irony which allowed him to keep the world described at a distance and present it more ‘objectively.’ The aloofness of the creator allowed him to control the material used and withstand the emotional tide likely to blur his lesson and message when confronted with the drab reality of a godless world. ‘I regard writing not as investigation of character,’ Waugh wrote ‘but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech, events that interest me.’2

4No doubt the words ‘drama, speech, events’ cast a clear light on Waugh’s goals as a writer and may account for his elimination of emotion, negative or positive from his plots. By ‘negative emotion’ I mean shallow, self-pitying pathos, by the adjective ‘positive’ I refer to those that relate to genuine, existential, ontological causes of elation or enthusiasm. As a matter of fact the early novels (to which I will confine this analysis) written between 1928 (Decline and Fall)3 and 1942 (Put Out More Flags)4 abound in instances that might easily give birth to sentimental purple patches which Waugh remorselessly eradicated from his plots. This conscious rejection of emotion is nowhere better exemplified than in the death-scenes which punctuate the plots of the novels. One dies very often here (Little Lord Tangent in Decline and Fall, Agatha Runcible in Vile Bodies,5 Prudence Courtenay in Black Mischief,6 John Andrew Last in A Handful of Dust,7 to mention but a few).

5In Decline and Fall, a ‘novelette’ which, according to the Author’s Note, is ‘MEANT TO BE FUNNY,’ the death of Little Lord Tangent is acted out in four widely separated sentences which seem impersonally, cynically even, to punctuate both Tangent’s pathetic but inexorable ‘decline and fall’ and Paul’s—the protagonist’s—insensitive and erratic progress. As a matter of fact the boy is despatched in four apparently casual remarks in the course of ninety-two pages. ‘Clearly Tangent was not going to win; he was sitting on the grass crying because he had been wounded in the foot by Mr Prendergast’s bullet’ (88) is the first one; ‘“Tangent’s foot has swollen and turned black,” said Beste-Chetwynde with relish. “Poor little brute,” said Paul’ (113) is the second. Then school being given a half-day holiday to celebrate ‘the bigamous union of Captain Edgar Grimes and Miss Florence Selina Fagan,’ we read: ‘Everybody else was there except Little Lord Tangent whose foot was being amputated at a local nursing-home’; (125) and finally ‘It’s maddening Tangent having died just at this time,’ [said Lady Circumference] ‘People may think that that’s my reason for refusing [to attend Margot and Paul’s marriage]!’ (177)

6Obviouly the treatment of the boy’s dramatic demise is not so gratuitous as it looks at first sight. His death is brushed aside as if unimportant when compared with Paul’s progress. One should not lose time with such banal events, the narrator seems to suggest. It is interesting to notice that the same treatment is reserved to more positive occurrences. Thus the marriage of Adam and Nina, the most important event in Vile Bodies, is dismissed in a few careless phrases as if it were of no importance (‘[Adam] in the course of his correspondence, had got engaged to be married,’ 15; ‘“I say, Nina... we shan’t be able to get married after all.” “No, I’m afraid not.” “It is a bore, isn’t it?”’ 63; ‘“Now we can’t get married,” said Nina,’ 109) until he sells her to his friend Ginger Littlejohn who marries her. Later, while Ginger is off to the war, Adam retrieves Nina for an adulterous Christmas night in the aptly named ‘Doubtin’’all’ of her father’s.

7Thus, in a context of general insanity, both the positive and negative emotions of the characters are suppressed from the plots yet subtly reinstated for the readers. At regular intervals the latter are reminded that the important things in life are neglected by characters who have lost their common sense (which they only recapture in their nightmares like Agatha Runcible in her coma). Waugh is thus able to denounce the insanity of the modern world and the confusion of the essential values while stating his own philosophy and criticizing the dominant ideology of an age incapable of recovering from the trauma of the First World War. He kills two birds with one stone as, in so doing, the structure of his novels is enriched by a subtle counterpointing which enhances the protagonists’ lapses, errors and faults in a seemingly emotionless, objective way.

8The fact is that in Waugh’s early fiction everything concurs to suppress emotion. As a staunch admirer of Firbank, ‘the first quite modern writer to solve for himself... the aesthetic problem of representation in fiction,’ Waugh strives ‘to achieve... a new balanced interrelation of subject and form.’8 He imitates a man whose ‘compositions are built up intricately and with a balanced alternation of the wildest extravagance and the most austere economy,’ a phrase that perfectly accounts for the early novels, in particular Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies.

9In this respect the manuscript of Decline and Fall, its ‘pre-text,’ is revelatory of Waugh’s intentions. The writer’s wish to deprive his ‘hero’ of all humanity, to create a puppet entirely subjected to his master is evident in the suppression of a long paragraph all too likely to arouse sympathy or emotion for the protagonist. Here it is, abridged but sufficient for our purpose:

Who am I?
I am Paul Pennyfeather. For all I know there may be a hundred other people with the same name... Why was I called Paul?... What do I mean when I say that I am Paul Pennyfeather? Sometimes I am a part and sometimes a whole. It is very perplexing.
Why am I here?

10If one chooses to disregard the amateurish clumsiness of the passage and tries to go beyond it, one realises that the suppression of the passage amounts to keeping the protagonist in a state of subjection (like Collodi’s Pinocchio), to refuse him any humanity and thus forbid any possibility of identification for the reader and suppress any potential source of emotion both within and without the narrative. The character’s moods are not of any concern to the writer. What matters is the emergence of a detachment favouring the reader’s reflection on the events described.

11Other techniques are systematically developed in the subsequent writings in an increasingly skilful, i.e. unobtrusive, way which, besides imparting their unmistakable flavour to the novels, allow the satirist to make his points at leisure far from the pitfalls of modernist subjectivity.

12The paratexts are thus put to use and help to set the reader thinking in a non-sentimental way. Considering the stories, the literary titles (Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust) echoing standard authors seem incongruous to the superficial reader. They are completed by a constant resort to intertextuality not only in the epigraphs (Lewis Carroll for Vile Bodies, T. S. Eliot for A Handful of Dust) but also within the texts (Eliot, Proust, Dickens, Tennyson, Malory intervening in A Handful of Dust). Gradually they help unify pages fragmented with typographical blanks. Ellipses, non sequiturs suggest new extensions of meaning and give breathing time to the reader thus enabled to perceive realities which the characters are unaware of. The incipit and explicit of Vile Bodies are a case in point as they unify the novel in an impersonal, unemotional but structurally inescapable way.

13‘It was clearly going to be a bad crossing,’ the opening sentence, is echoed, amplified and completed by its closing counterpart ‘like a circling typhoon the sounds of battle began to return.’ The reader is thus led to decide for himself what links the initial storm with the final cataclysm and what it suggests about the nature and message of the story. Obliged to fend for himself, he is nevertheless provided with hidden threads which he must patiently identify, unravel and follow to perceive the author’s intentions in his apparently unemotional narratives.

14Occasionally a brief, visual image flashes out to illuminate and explain the flickering succession of spoken words in a purely selective art. Alvin Kernan entitled a seminal article ‘The Wall and the Jungle’9 and architecture is consistently used throughout as an obsessive metaphor of the British decadence.

15London, the place of interiority in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, a cell of meditation so to speak, becomes in Waugh’s fiction metonymic of the vacuity of modern life, of its shallow exteriority, of the decadence of a world ‘bereft of order.’ King’s Thursday in Decline and Fall, Anchorage House and Doubting Hall in Vile Bodies, the beleaguered old fort at Matodi in Black Mischief, Brat’s and Hetton Abbey in A Handful of Dust, Fleet Street and Boot Magna Hall in Scoop,10 all set the stage for the death of any inward space both in the capital and the countryside.

16Descriptions are suppressed and superseded by action and the reliance on cinematographic techniques. As early as 1921, at his coming up to Hertford College, Evelyn Waugh wrote to Dudley Carew, who had succeeded him as editor of the Lancing College Magazine:

Try and bring home thoughts by action and incidents. Dont make a wrong thing said.
This is the inestimable value of the cinema to novelists... make things happen.
... Whatever the temptation for God’s sake don’t bring characters on simply to draw their characters and make them talk. Fit them into a design.
... do MAKE THINGS HAPPEN... GO TO THE CINEMA and risk the headache.11

17Furthermore, an external narrator, most of the time absent from the scene, is occasionally made to step in at strategic and unexpected intervals. Killing the narrative mimesis, stifling the incipient emotion and leaving the reader as sole judge of what has happened. Such interjections as ‘Alas, poor booby, he was bang right,’ on which Put Out More Flags closes, or the famous ‘Those Vile Bodies!’ in the eponymous novel dispel the illusion of general merrymaking in an innocuous universe and initiate the reader’s passionless reflection on the real nature of the world depicted.

18In Waugh’s novels everything concurs to the suppression of emotion and, concurrently, to the promotion of the reader’s reflection. In any case the writer pulls the strings of a huge machinery which leaves no place for the exploration of the psyche or the display of the characters’ fleeting moods and impressions. What matters is the message and the characters are mere counters in a literary game which the reader must play according to rules which, although far apart from the modernist ones, are all the same new and truly modern.

19Waugh and Woolf started from the same assumptions. Old forms of art were dead, new ones must be found. For Woolf the traditional narrative conventions and their rules must be abandoned and subjective experience preferred: ‘The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms... Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit...?’12 Waugh objected to this quasi-mystical aspect of modernism which offered no substitute for lost faith. He went his own separate way, staying outside his characters, never probing into their motivations, brushing emotion aside in order to make his points better.

20Now that artists had been deprived of the usual sources of order, Woolf argued that they had no choice but to explore the self apart from society. Waugh, on the contrary, retained a classical ideology. The conservative rationalist in him rejected the notion of subjective truth, the Catholic convert refused the idea that ‘the dark places of psychology’ (Woolf 155) can account for the human being in the same way that he rejected the idea that the Victorian humanism could in itself save mankind. As a consequence, he reflected in his techniques the contemporary collapse of values, the dissolution of certainties and tried to create an alternative to the Modernists’ vision. A Roman Catholic satirist, he debunked the ‘modern’ world better to promote the idea that God is essential to the survival of the human being. To put it briefly, Evelyn Waugh is a committed and religious modernist.

21In his eyes, the experimentations of such modernist leaders as James Joyce or Virginia Woolf illustrated a twentieth century that was blind to the essential values of life and impervious to the problems of man’s place in the universe. Theirs was a purely narcissistic and emotional, not to say irresponsible, stance. Evelyn Waugh, and on a different plane and in altogether different genres, other writers like T. S. Eliot, rejected moods, emotions which, albeit interesting on a psychological plane, blinded man to the reality of his existence and advocated a more altruistic, Christian vision.

22In the same way Waugh rejected the vagaries of D. H. Lawrence and his dialogic, multivocal novels in which he orchestrated many a different discourse creating a kind of discursive polyphony as it were, with a dominant perspective rooted in the idea of the primacy of sex and bodily life over intellectuality, whereas he wrote from a Roman Catholic standpoint based on a strictly identified system of values which had no need of dialogism. The body’s needs were downplayed, the mind’s emotions appeared to be trivial, deceitful phenomena which need not be discussed. In his fiction, his characters, blind to the reality of life, wander in the darkness of a delusion which is constantly denounced in a non-emotional, purely impersonal manner.

23Indeed Evelyn Waugh might have applied to Virginia Woolf the judgment she passed on the Edwardian writers: ‘they have developed a technique of novel-writing which suits their purpose; they have made tools and established conventions which do their business. But those tools are not [my] tools, and that business is not [my] business.’13

24The rejection of emotion through the recourse to impersonal techniques becomes the satirist’s methods and targets and helps him denounce the blindness of a world turned mad. Evelyn Waugh did not think that the subject-matter of art was to display the immediate data of consciousness. He could not accept the Modernists’ metaphysical emptiness, abdication of reason, aimless pursuit of sensation. But, for all that, he did not side with the Victorian writers and their ‘façade of nineteenth century reasonableness’ whose ‘deluding sentimentality’ he abhorred. His novels present an alternative to mainstream modernist fiction. In them shallow, trivial emotion is stifled with modern techniques inherited from Firbank and his friends in order better to promote the essential values of life.

25Like Firbank, Waugh used a specifically externalist art, which became the vehicle for imparting coherence to his own Christian Weltanschauung. The writer, by remaining aloof, objective, and impersonal, solves the problem which most vexes a modernist novelist forced into a subjective attitude to his material and dazzled by minor epiphenomena (emotions) which have nothing profound to offer to the understanding of the nature of Man. Not so Waugh who, referring to A Handful of Dust thirty years later, said to Julian Jebb ‘[My novel] contained all I had to say about humanism,’ meaning all he had to say about a world turned agnostic or atheist, a world fascinated by unessential moods and feelings, a world which had lost sight of what was essential in his eyes ‘his relation to God.’ As such he adamantly opposed ‘modernist writers since and including James Joyce [who] try to represent the whole human mind and soul and yet omit its determining character—that of being God’s creature with a defined purpose.’14

26Two writers did co-exist in Waugh: on the one hand, the emotional journalist, the passionate polemist, the articulate essayist always prone to tilt at contemporary windmills, the self-proclaimed mouthpiece of his generation, the protector of ancestral traditions and, above all, the defender of the Roman Catholic faith. And on the other, the novelist, apparently detached, aloof, who defended the same causes with different weapons by obliging his readers to bear the brunt of his reflection. In his early novels externality reigned but the emotion, the feeling eradicated from the plots, the repressed subjectivity were transmitted to readers who, through their own analyses, interpretations, meditations would hopefully fathom the tragedy of man in this our faithless age. Let us conclude with McCartney: ‘With his handling of Nietszchean and Bergsonian themes, his ironic re-working of Bauhaus and Futurist theories, or his borrowings from film technique, Waugh gave evidence that he was consciously taking his place in what he called “the advance guard” despite his notoriously antique tastes.’15 But while Woolf wanted to raise ordinary experience to an occasion of extraordinary revelation, Waugh resisted her modernist attempt to make art a substitute for religion.

27A member of the Corpse Club at Lancing College, of the Dilettanti Society at Oxford, Evelyn Waugh first sided with the modernists but soon decided to follow a different path, thus illustrating the richness of a period and of a generation unanimous in its rejection of the values of the past. Against Bloomsbury, he became the mouthpiece of the Bright Young People and took part in a perennial combat which opposed, in these so-called ‘Roaring Twenties,’ Bloomsbury to the Bright Young People in London, experimentalists and externalists in the domain of art and literature, the former more cerebral, the latter more matter-of-fact (in appearance at least), all intent on creating the forms of a New Age16 teeming with inventions and desirous to sever the cord from the ancient forms of writing. Waugh and Woolf, in short, illustrate two of the facets of a versatile modernism, another illustration of the saying that ‘In the father’s house are many mansions.’17

28Later in his career, after the trauma of the Second World War, in which he gallantly participated, the emotion, the feeling, the nostalgia, which, as a young scapegrace writer, he had expelled from his hilarious, ebullient fiction, assailed the middle-aged novelist who re-integrated the great elegiac British tradition with Brideshead Revisited: ‘My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.’18 A new proof, if need be, that the artist, however aloof he holds himself, is always and specifically the creature of the Zeitgeist.19