injustice and economic problems proved false. Some liked the idea of the
Communist experiment in Russia. In 1930, 107 Nazis were elected to the Reichstag.
The end of high modernism was also the end of the irresponsible years of the
Bright Young Things. Brightness was also to be found in Strachey’s Bloomsbury,
where the Charleston was not danced, and in the writings of Aldous Huxley, the
Sitwells, Rose Macaulay, William Gerhardie, the plays of Noël Coward and the cyni-
cal Somerset Maugham. That spray-on brightness has made even Huxley’s novels of
ideas seem dated, though his scientific Brave New World (1932) can be read against
George Orwell’s political Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). These two dystopias breathe
the moods of the Twenties and of the Thirties respectively. The timeless world of
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975), who kept his brightness under a bushel for 120
volumes, has not dated; he is not a novelist of ideas, but a master of style. Much of
what was enjoyable in these authors is distilled and superseded in Decline and Fall
(1928), the first novel of a latecomer to the party,Evelyn Waugh(1903–1966).
His father, Arthur Waugh, a publisher and critic, had in a review in the Quarterly
Reviewof 1916, likened the poetry of T. S. Eliot to the behaviour of a drunken Helot:
‘It was a classic custom [in ancient Sparta] in the family hall, when a feast was at its
height, to display a drunken slave among the sons of the household, to the end that
they, being ashamed at the ignominious folly of his gesticulations, might determine
never to be tempted into such a pitiable condition themselves.’ The philosopher
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) on meeting Eliot before he came to London noticed
Eliot’s ‘Etonian manners’. Virginia Woolf described him, in a letter to Clive Bell, as
wearing ‘a three-piece suit, there being no four-piece suits’. What made Arthur Waugh
liken this urbane patrician to a drunken slave exhibited as a warning to the ruling
class? His reaction, shared by Robert Graves, needs to be understood, for modernism
did not conquer or transform English literature: it modified it and was assimilated.
The Waste Land was unlike pre vious poems: metrically irregular, jaggedly discon-
tinuous in sense, full of foreign quotations. Not all of it was even in English. Poetry
that is ‘simple, sensuous and passionate’ (Milton’s prescription) needs to be in the
mother tongue.The Waste Land uses three languages before it reaches English, and
later uses three more. Dr Johnson’s saying that ‘a man should should show as much
ofhis Gre ek as he does of his lace’ still has a point: why say ‘œuvre’when you can say
‘wor k’? Virginia Woolf admired Eliot, but lamented his neglect of the literary ‘deco-
rums’ of her youth.The Waste Land also fails to convey what Pound called ‘beautiful
thoughts in flowery language’. Arthur Waugh’s reaction to the pretensions of these
young Americans was widely shared; it overtook the far from stuffy early Imagist,
Richard Aldington, Eliot’s junior. There was the frightful thought that the future
might be American.
Arthur Waugh’s anti-modern irony descended in lethal form to his son Evelyn,
who as an undergraduate liked to outrage his elders, though he preferred to be
drunk as a lord rather than as a Helot. He thought Eliot’s Poems, 1909–1925 ‘marvel-
lously good, but very hard to understand’ and picked their ‘most impressive flavour
of the minor prophets’. The title of his darkest novel,A Handful ofDust (1934),
comes from The Waste Land.
Interviewer: Have you found a professional criticism of your work illuminating
or helpful? Edmund Wilson, for example?
Evelyn Waugh: Is he an American?
Interviewer: Yes.
Waugh: I don’t think what they have to say is of much interest, do you?364 13 · FROM POST-WAR TO POST-WAR: 1920–55