Waugh In Our Time

Nearly six decades after his death in 1966, the British novelist, short story writer, memoirist, biographer, critic, journalist, and foreign correspondent Evelyn Waugh keeps coming up in discussion. References to him in contemporary reportage, books, movies, and academic discourse are far too myriad to catalog. Waugh has much to say to us in 2023.

That is the view of Jamie Collinson, an author and the secretary of the London-based Evelyn Waugh Society, who recently took time out of his crammed scheduled to share his thoughts on the creative talent whom his organization promotes and celebrates.

In our wide-ranging interview, Collinson, whose newest book The Rejects will be out from Little, Brown in February, mentioned Waugh’s ubiquity and the fact that nearly all reviews of the hit movie Saltburn contain a reference to Waugh.

That is not surprising. One of the film’s protagonists, the young aristocrat Felix, tells the strange young visitor to his estate that his relatives seem to him to provide the inspiration for all Waugh’s characters. Felix’s parents, in particular, represent the kind of vain and pompous high-society toffs Waugh loved to satirize in his stories and novels.

Ultimately, the Waugh reference in Saltburn feels like a strained attempt to lend gravitas to a flashy but vacuous thriller. If you really want insight into Britain’s aristocracy, social dynamics, class rivalries, imperial aims, literary ambitions, geopolitical entanglements, and military humiliations, there is no better source to turn to than the writer himself. Waugh wrote with the ear of a poet and the precision of a surgeon, never using too many or too few words, and he ran circles around even George Orwell in the breadth of his interests and the scope of his literary explorations.

Whether he set his works at an estate buried deep in the sedate hinterland of northern England, or a town in Wales, or a chaotic Yugoslavian village in the midst of war and upheaval, or an African state trying to find its way in the world, or the hellhole known as Hollywood, Waugh wrote with verisimilitude and found the uproarious humor always ready to pounce from behind the workaday. Today he is controversial, and a candidate for cancellation, because his pen did not spare the sacred cows of progressive dogma. Indeed it often seems when reading Waugh that he reserved a special contempt for ideological fads that tried to claim the status of gospel.

But in our interview, Collinson pointed out that Waugh did not suffer fools gladly regardless of where or in what guise they might appear, and that people who tar him as a supercilious toff and a haughty guardian of highbrow taste ignore his tendency to skewer members of his own class the most savagely of all.

Let’s talk about Waugh’s contemporary image. His “Hollywood novel,” The Loved One, features a character who feels crushed by his rejection at the hands of the studios and becomes suicidal. It seems timely in light of the writers’ and actors’ strike that brought film production to a halt this year. For all his identification in the popular mind as an aristocrat, Waugh depicted the plight of desperate people on society’s margins. Do you think people appreciate this complexity nowadays?

Collinson: I think this subtlety and complexity probably isn’t sufficiently appreciated in that Waugh isn’t as widely read as he should be, and a caricature of him as a haughty reactionary persists. That said, I think Waugh’s reputation as a literary great is pleasingly intact. The strength of his writing is undeniable, so even with academia in arguably its most left-leaning state ever, Waugh hasn’t been “cancelled” or ignored. Of course, it would be impossible to be a first-rate satirist without having some empathy with the underdog and without the complexity you refer to. Waugh’s satire is obviously very gimlet-eyed and sharp—one of the things that makes it so thrilling—but he turned that unforgiving glare on to all of his characters without fear or favor. He is never blunt or bigoted.

I think among anyone with some knowledge of or expertise in literature (and I don’t mean to include myself here!), Waugh’s complexity is appreciated. I always remember Angus Calder’s introduction to the Sword of Honour trilogy. Calder was a man of the Left, and he pointed out that it was testament to Waugh’s talent that he could make a perversely archaic, hierarchical vision of life so alluring. In fact, the emblems of aristocracy in that novel—Ivor Claire springs to mind—are some of the most corrupt.

Nancy Mitford told Waugh that he was kind-hearted underneath the grotesque mask he put on for the world, and I think that’s obviously true. He was injured and damaged and hid that beneath an irascibility and ferocity, but he saw things very clearly, and as one of the greatest literary talents he never let prejudice get in the way of that clarity. As Martin Stannard points out in his biography, Waugh disliked racial prejudice, especially and more pointedly later in his life. As for The Loved One, I think the protagonist is a cad in the Basil Seal mold, from memory, but like Basil he’s very funny.

But are there areas of his work that non-members of your society—or even members—find problematic? For example, his rather brutal satire of a former colonial state in Black Mischief, or his skewering of “enlightened” penological approaches in Decline and Fall, where an inmate in a prison carpentry program uses a saw to remove a well-meaning priest’s head?

It’s a while since I’ve read Black Mischief, but I seem to remember that the most brutal and hilarious satire is reserved for the white colonial characters. That said, Waugh was an equal opportunities satirist in that no one was safe. Waugh was clearly a conservative, or as he describes his alter ego in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold—“maintaining an idiosyncratic Toryism which was quite unrepresented in the political parties of his time and was regarded by his neighbors as being almost as sinister as socialism.” As such, I think it’s safe to say he’d have been skeptical of dangerously naive do-gooding, represented by the Decline incident you refer to.

George Orwell, near the end of his life, wrote that “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions.” Do you think that Waugh’s continued appreciation faces dangers in this age of cancellation and de-platforming of creators?

As above, Waugh seems to have got away with it somehow. I think probably that’s down to the hysterical cancellation types not having read him (do they read anything, or just look at TikTok?), but more so the fact that his talent is, as Orwell implies, absolutely undeniable. I remember being astonished by the crystalline clarity of the prose when I first encountered him.

The modernity of it was striking, compared to the far more verbose, maximalist work of his contemporaries—something like Malcolm Lowry springs to mind. The way he can draw a character in a few deft sketches, the insistence on “action, dialogue and the sequence of time,” as opposed to dull description. The humor and the perfect arcs of the narratives. Also: the astonishing imagination and under-recognized experimentalism—and of the most successful and exciting kind. The ending of A Handful of Dust is one of the most unexpected and breathtaking that I’ve encountered in fiction.

One thing I’ve noted since my love of Waugh’s work developed: rarely a week goes by that I don’t notice some reference to him, usually in a newspaper or cultural magazine or similar. He looms very large, simply because he’s so good.

In short, I think the clue is in the Orwell quote: it perfectly summarizes why Waugh is still read and loved and will never be cancelled.

Why do you think so few films have been made out of Waugh’s literary achievements? There was a film based on the The Loved One in 1965, a Brideshead Revisited miniseries in 1981, and a film of A Handful of Dust in 1988, but that’s about it. My understanding is that Waugh once turned down a $150,000 deal for film rights to Brideshead Revisited, because the contract did not grant him a veto over the script. But that hardly explains the dearth of films since he passed away in 1966.

Yes, Waugh went on an enjoyable, paid trip to Los Angeles to discuss a film adaption of Brideshead. He then insisted on it being in black and white, much to the bafflement and eventual disappointment of the studio. He used the time to go and explore Forest Lawn Cemetery—“the only original thing in California”—and to treat his wife, Laura. Waugh also bumped into Harold Acton at the Huntington Library, where some of his papers now reside. There was a recent British TV adaptation of Decline and Fall which went down fairly well. I think that stories about white, upper-class people have been deeply unpopular with commissioning types of late, for reasons too obvious to go into. That said, I note that the new film Saltburn has a Waugh reference in every review.

The Catholic messaging in the later books is perhaps unappealing to the generally left-leaning and atheist-ish types—a generalization, I know—who make films. A lot of people simply don’t understand the ending to Brideshead, for example, and see it as a great tragedy. But I think there’s something in the nature of the books. They are perfect novels, and thus conceived to work best in that form. In some ways you’d think that a novelist so focused on “action, dialogue and the sequence of time” would make the perfect choice for adaptation.

In reality though, there’s something about the magnetism of the prose, the gimlet-eye of the writer, the spark of the dialogue that I think just works best on the page. But I’m someone who infinitely prefers books to films, so what do I know. There are other examples of this: Michel Faber’s Under the Skin seems like a book crying out to be adapted, but when it was, by the brilliant Jonathan Glazer, its key, horrifying moments were abstracted and lost all their power. Perhaps that was down to budget, who knows. I suppose the excellence of the Brideshead adaptation shows it could be done with Waugh if someone just went with the work.

Interestingly, Waugh was a cinema buff and I think went to see a film weekly—at least until his later years. He always gave the price of a cinema ticket to collection at church.

Is organized interest in Waugh these days largely the domain of people with a scholarly interest in Waugh’s work, or a fondness for the dandyish lifestyle, or perhaps a little of both?

No, I think Waugh is read by all kinds of people and is right up there as a literary great who’s still being discovered. That said, I do think he should be more widely read, and it’s a shame that he’s not as perennially fashionable as someone like Orwell. Waugh was the superior novelist, after all. I certainly don’t see Waugh as being in a ghetto of those kinds though. I came to Waugh via A Handful of Dust, recommended by a bohemian London-dwelling woman to my left wing, experimental fiction-loving employer at the time. It just goes to show.

Looking back on your Evelyn Waugh Society, from its founding to the present, where do you see interest in Waugh as reaching its peak? And what insights can you offer on this writer’s posthumous fortune?

 I’ve only been a member of the Society since 2017. I’m pleased to say that I detect more interest in Waugh recently than at any other time in those six years. I had the sense that he was very unfashionable when I joined, but as per the above in terms of just how often he’s referred to culturally, I think that has changed. There are rumors of a star-studded new Brideshead adaptation, lurid stories such as that of the Piers Court ownership debacle, references in those Saltburn reviews, and as I said, barely a week goes by that I don’t encounter his name. Perhaps that’s partly because times like these cry out for a satirist such as Waugh. He would have had a field day.