Uh, Is This Correct?

I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious to conceal.

--Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall 15 (Back Bay Paperback 1999)

Waugh, Naipaul and Changing Tastes in Kleptocracy

Mr. and Mrs. Buce enjoyed a viewing of Scoop, the other night--not the Woody Allen Scoop, but the earlier movie based on the Evelyn novel. It's good, though a bit slow paced, a bit Merchant Ivory-like--a visual aid best enjoyed by people who already knew the novel.

But it did remind us how much we enjoyed the novel (along with its companion piece, Black Mischief). And it caused us to marvel again--how did Waugh understand so much, so early, about kleptocracy, chaos and general mismanagement in the Third World (or more precisely in Central Africa)? In this respect at least, he makes you think of Conrad, who had an uncanny way of understanding things in his own time that other people didn't figure out for a couple of generations (think Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, Nostromo, etc.).

But it might be helpful to put him context. It happened that just a few days before, on whim, I had been reading a Sven Birkerts essay on V. S. Naipaul (reprinted in the excellent collection, An Artificial Wilderness (1987--but the essay is obviously earlier)). Birket focuses on Naipaul's A Bend in the River and Guerillas--two corrosively clear-sighted novelistic accounts of misgovernment in forgotten places. They are good, Birkerts admits, but a little, well hard, as in cold, unfunny.

They are hard; you don't read Naipaul for laughs (the mature Naipaul, at any rate--the early stuff has some warm-hearted chuckles). But I remember reading them in the late 70s or early 80s with a great sense of delight--at last! Someone knows how to speak the truth!

Naipaul was, then, a tipping point: a point at which we recognized (or admitted to ourselves) that all was not well in the new nations and that some of our best hopes were being defeated by experience. Waugh, of course, had seen it all a generation before. At the time, readers recognized that his books were funny, in an unkind, scabrous ("hard") kind of way. But they were a bit of a scandal in their own time; not the sort of thing that nice people admitted to reading, or liking.

We've come a long way. Waugh's stock has never been higher. Naipaul's stock--well, it hasn't exactly fallen, but he certainly isn't on the radar the way he was a few years ago. He's done his job, and moved on. That we can now enjoy Waugh without apology or even any obvious regret--I leave it to the reader to consider whether or not this is an improvement.

Fn.: the movie may be a bit ho hum, but Donald Pleasance as the megalomaniac press lord, is a stitch.

A Find: Evelyn Waugh's Helena

I picked up my copy of Evelyn Waugh's Helena -- I don't know where, probably in Palookaville's premier used bookshop. I guess I thought it was a leftover, an afterthought. I assumed it was out of print. Silly me. First off, it is in print (link). Second, apparently it was Waugh's own favorite.

I guess I can understand why: Waugh was a Catholic of the take-no-prisoners variety. Helena here is the mother of Constantine, she of the True Cross. Waugh here working hard at the top of his game and he must have assumed he had achieved a triumph of apologetics.

Thing is though, he is far too good a novelist to let mere apologetics get in the way. What he has produced is a swift, entertaining--and in its own way, deeply perceptive--little jeu d'esprit.

As a character, Helena of Helena is more or less cardboard. But no matter, Waugh's strength lies elsewhere. He's a satirist, of course, and more generally, a great comic. But he is best understood as a political novelist: Black Mischief ranks as one of the great political novels of all time; Officers and Gentlemen is best read in the same vein, and Scoop is not far behind. The great virtue of Helena is the way it captures the temper of its time--the great tectonic shift from the ancient world to the medieval.

Waugh is second of all a master of the elegaic---think Brideshead Revisited--and his knack for here succeeds in completing the historical framework. Helena does, indeed, get to Jerusalem and she does (or does not) find the true cross. But she's past 80 in the novel (as indeed, apparently she was in real life). It's a few pages at the end, and it's about the only place where Waugh really lays on the Christianity with a trowel. In terms of structure, they provide a fit conclusion, but the truth is that for sheer enjoyment, you'd be almost as well off if somebody tore those last pages off and threw them away.

Helena is at her best as a hot-blooded young tomboy on the Britannic frontier, as an enduring wife and a resourceful castoff in the provinces; and late in life, as a baffled matriarch in the snakes and ladders of political Rome. Here as a taste is Waugh's Helena in mid-career, left behind in Dalmatia while her husband pursues a life of action:

For thirteen years Helena lived alone. Her hair lost its fierce colour and, scorning dyes, she wore it always wound in a silk shawl. She thickened in limb and body, held herself firmer, moved more resolutely, spoke with authority and decision, took careful count of her possessions, gave orders and saw them obeyed. She had moved, on Constantius's elevation,from Government House to his villa, purchased and enclosed a large estate and made it thrive. She knew every man and beast on the place and the yield of each plantation; her wine commanded a high price in the market at Salona. Westward in the rough sea-face of the sheltering islands the great waves struck and splattered; eastward, in winter, the high Dinaric forests were torn by blizzards which the people on the plain never heard; nor saw save as a smudge of indigo on the moutain crests and in the wreckage which drifted on the tideless channel and lay there, barely stirring, for the boys to pick. Here among oleander and myrtle, lizard and cicada, Helena gently laid down the load of her womanhood. Here, it seemed, far from home, she would in full time die.

Evelyn Waugh, Helena 70 (Penguin Books ed. 1963)

Now, if only could find my copy of Jacob Burkhardt's Age of Constantine the Great.

Postscript: Haven't found Burkhardt, but I did find my copy of Waugh's letters. I checked to see if he wrote much about Helena. He wrote a bit, of which this from a letter dated 15 January 1946, to Penelope Benjamin (wife of John) is perhaps the most interesting:

I describe her as hunting in the morning after her wedding night feeling the saddle as comforting her wounded maidenhead. Is that O.K.?

Penelope must have approved; it's in the book.