When I last wrote, here, of Evelyn Waugh, I cribbed my title, "Splendors of Evelyn Waugh," from an essay by Edmund Wilson called "Splendors and Miseries of Evelyn Waugh." I'd only read the novel called A Handful of Dust, and loved it, so there had been no misery. I've now read two more, The Loved One and Men at Arms—still no misery, though for me neither one is quite up to the level of the one I happened to read first. The Loved One is a satire on the funeral industry in southern California. It's very brief, quite funny, and maybe a bit of a confection, like a movie you enjoy and never think of again. Waugh, an Englishman, spent some time writing for the studios in Hollywood, an experience that must account for the American setting. The author's gimlet eye traveled well.
Men at Arms, the first installment in a World War II trilogy called Sword of Honor, is longer and more ambitious. Reading around hither and thither, one gathers that the novels of this trilogy—the second and third installments are Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender (published in the U.S. as The End of the Battle)—are often regarded as Waugh's finest. I doubt it's an opinion to which I'd subscribe, for Men at Arms bores me intermittently. The hero, if that's the right word, is Guy Crouchback. Like the main character in A Handful of Dust (and like Waugh himself), he is shocked to be abandoned and divorced by his wife, and, in the case of Crouchback, sees military service in a just cause as a way to rally himself. But he's in his mid-30s. The title might appear to promise scenes of battle, but nine-tenths or more of the book concerns Crouchback's efforts to enlist, and, once he's in, the long days and weeks and months of nothing as his somewhat eccentric unit trains and awaits orders. You can see perhaps why it might be subject to dullness—the dullness seems to be the point. Think you know about soldiering in time of war? No, Waugh is saying, it's not like that.
Some part of the narrative interest must arise from the reader wondering what will happen when Crouchback and his colleagues finally "see action." When this happens, toward the very end, the details are farcical. The short chapter describing their expedition across enemy ground ends, "The brigade resumed its old duty of standing by for orders." The next sentence, the first one of the following chapter, is: "Three weeks later the Brigade was still standing by for orders." Crouchback's final fate is determined not by enemy fire or any battlefield event but, rather, by a gift of whiskey for a hospitalized colleague. The hospitalization is not the result of a wound incurred in battle. The patient, however, dies.
I say I was intermittently bored. The book is often very amusing in a way that elicits from critics and reviewers the compound adjective, seriocomic. In one of my favorite episodes, Crouchback, a Catholic, listens as a somewhat absurd fellow communicant relates a story about a divorced Catholic who had a one-night stand with his ex that resulted in a pregnancy and thus the perpetuation of an English Catholic family through a male heir who, but for the tryst, would never have been conceived. Crouchback's friend discerns God's providence. Crouchback is more taken by the suggestion that the divorced Catholic had not really screwed another man's wife, since by canon law she was still married to him. He turns the question over in his mind and, having satisfied himself that the man was indeed sinless, at the next opportunity boards a train for London, where he knows his ex, the inaptly named Virginia, resides. She's no longer married to the man for whom she left Crouchback, and her history apparently raises his expectation of success, but the seduction does not go well:
"I was wrong in thinking the army had changed you for the better. Whatever your faults in the old days you weren't a cad. You're worse than Augustus now."
"You forget I don't know Augustus."
"Well, take it from me he was a monumental cad."
A tiny light gleamed in their darkness, a pin-point in each easy tear which swelled in her eyes and fell.
"Admit I'm not as bad as Augustus."
"Very little to choose. But he was fatter. I'll admit that."
She might be loose but she's not dumb:
"You used to be so strict and pious. I rather liked it in you. What's happened to all that?"
"It's still there. More than ever. I told you so when we first met again."
"Well, what would your priests say about your goings-on to-night; picking up a notorious divorcée in an hotel?"
"They wouldn't mind. You're my wife."
"Oh, rot."
"Well, you asked what the priests would say. They'd say: 'Go ahead.'"
The light that had shone and waxed in their blackness suddenly snapped out as though at the order of an air-raid warden.
"But this is horrible," said Virginia.
Guy was taken by surprise this time.
"What's horrible?" he said.
"It's absolutely disgusting. It's worse than anything Augustus or Mr. Troy could ever dream of. Can't you see, you pig, you?"
"No," said Guy in deep, innocent sincerity. "No, I don't see."
"I'd far rather be taken for a tart. I'd rather have been offered five pounds to do something ridiculous in high heels or drive you round the room in toy harness or any of the things they write about in books." Tears of rage and humiliation were flowing unresisted. "I thought you'd taken a fancy for me again and wanted a bit of fun for the sake of old times. I thought you'd chosen me specially, and by God you had. Because I was the only woman in the whole world your priests would let you go to bed with. That was my attraction. You wet, smug, obscene, pompous, sexless lunatic pig."
This is notable partly because in the novel Guy Crouchback often seems to speak for the author, whose Catholic faith and generally conservative views the character shares. But there isn't a question about who appears in a better light here, right? At least to me, an outsider, Crouchback and his Church, as well as his friend who told the story about how the male heir got his start, appear ridiculous. The light in a hotel room illuminates something wet and smug that might go undetected in the reading room of a theological library.
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