years. The keynote, from which she wandered, is a kind of religious despair seen
from its comic side. Her best known poem ends with a couplet which has entered
the language: ‘I was much further out than you thought, / And not waving but
drowning’ (‘Not Waving but Drowning’, 1957).
The novel
Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) seemed at the time the opposite of Auden. His
eminence among novelists was less absolute and briefer than Auden’s among poets,
yet the careers have similarities, for at Oxford Waugh gained some Wildean friends
and a third-class degree (in history). Like Auden, he then taught in a preparatory
school for boys to the age of 13.
Decline and Fall traces the fortunes of Paul Pennyfeather, innocent victim of an
undergraduate prank, sent down from Oxford, teaching at Llanabba Castle, a far
from banal boarding school staffed by miscreants, notably the bigamous Captain
Grimes. On sports day, young Lord Tangent is shot in the foot. Paul is taken to bed
by the glamorous Margot Beste-Chetwynde, the widowed mother of a pupil. About
to marry her, he is sent to Egdon Heath Penal Settlement (this was the year of
Thomas Hardy’s funeral) for unwitting complicity in her white slave trade. There he
reflects on ‘the undeniable cogency of Peter Beste-Chetwynde’s “You can’t see
Mamma in prison, can you?” The more Paul considered this, the more he perceived
it to be the statement of a natural law’. Margot, now Lady Metroland, arranges his
release and return to Oxford and theology.
In 1930, Waugh was received into the Catholic Church.Decline and Fall,Vile
Bodies (1930),Black Mischief(1932),A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoo p (1938) are
often described as satire.Scoop is a satire on Fleet Street, and the Mayfair creatures
ofVile Bodiesare cer tainly wor thless and silly. But these novels are black comedies
about an absurd world, written with detachment and a demonic joy: they are not
realistic. It is the Wodehouse world, but post-imperial and seen by a man whom
Belloc described as ‘possessed’. Thus the death of Lord Tangent, the imprisonment
of Paul, and the shipping off of girls to brothels in South America seem as funny as
the devices by which Jeeves preserves Bertram Wooster from wearing the wrong tie,
or from marrying girls who think that the stars are God’s daisy-chain. Grimes seems
no more sinister than Wodehouse’s Black Shorts movement.
A fairy godfather in the background of Evelyn Waugh’s writing was Ronald
Firbank (1886–1926), the heir to a small fortune, who carried the decadent tradi-
tions of the 1890s through to the 1920s in a Beardsley-like style both economical and
outrageously precious. Firbank drank in the Café Royal, perfecting such conversa-
tional openings as: ‘Off to Haiti tomorrow, I hear the President is a perfect dear.’ His
compressed novelettes, published mostly at his own expense, and stylishly illustrated
by commissioned artists, include Vainglory(1915),Caprice(1917),Valmouth(1919),
Prancing Nigger(1924), and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli(1926).
His fantastic worlds are peopled by theatrical exotics: titled ladies, royals, lesbians
and ecclesiastics. Anthony Powell remarked that writers of Firbank’s generation had
to innovate or die. Firbank never sinks to the level of the normal.
Waugh’s world is mad as well as depraved, but he does not convey a hope that it
may change for the better. The idea that rank involves responsibility, presupposed
NON-MODERNISM:THE TWENTIES AND THIRTIES 369