Evelyn Waugh - 'The Loved One'

My idea of Evelyn Waugh (and this is probably typical) is of a '30s dandy: cynical, frivolous, with perfect manners and atrocious behaviour. His early books define him (Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Scoop), and lead to that engaging anomaly Brideshead Revisited, which strips the business of declining and falling of its laughs, and binds it to a misunderstood Catholicism. My idea of E. M. Forster is similar: a clutch of brilliant books written while young, which tripped from the tongue and fly from the page; then a gap, when middle age approaches and writing quickly and brilliantly is no longer automatic (nor, therefore, possible); finally a more serious return to the fray, lengthier, more considered, with A Passage to India and Brideshead Revisited.

This is my idea, but I find myself mistaken when it comes to Waugh. With him, there is no big gap between the two styles: Scoop was written as late as 1938 and, if my 1977 Penguin edition of The Loved One is to be believed, Put Out More Flags (1942) is in the same, earlier vein. Of course WWII goes a long way towards explaining the serious and regretful tones of Brideshead (1945). There's still plenty of fun to be had in that book, but I've long assumed that it was the tail end: that the Sword of Honour trilogy (1952 - 61) marked the end of the fun in Waugh. Not having read it, I can't say for sure, but The Loved One (1948) throws a few spanners in the works of this theory.

A novella set in Los Angeles on the periphery of the film industry, The Loved One shares its action between the Happier Hunting Ground (a pet crematorium) and the Whispering Glades (a preposterously over-wrought human one). Which is enough to tell you that this is a satire on America. In itself this is interesting: all Waugh's previous books are about England and the colonies (very much as colonies), so why this shift of scene? Post war, of course, the British Empire began to crumble, and it had been proved that Britain was no longer in the first rank of international powers, and so for the first time Waugh was writing in a world in which America must be acknowledged (which is not the same thing as taking it seriously). He was also no longer young (again for the first time - Scoop came out when he was 35; The Loved One ten years later. Brideshead has a foot in each camp).

And so, the scene shifted from London to Hollywood, the new capital of the world. But where '30s London was evoked in earlier books through character (characters at parties, characters shut out from parties), '40s Los Angeles comes to the reader via the medium of institutions. This is beautifully done: the Whispering Glades are vividly realised as a theme park of remembrance, with lavish and hideous gardens, numerous stone carvings, imported churches, and various suites in the main building in which embalmed, made-up Loved Ones can entertain one last time. The Happier Hunting Ground, meanwhile, can only dream of such grandeur: most of its customers won't even buy a casket for their departed pets. The characters which inhabit these institutions are weak in comparison. The strongest is Mr Joyboy (a supporting character at best), the embalmer who communicates his affection for cosmetician Aimee through the facial expressions of the corpses he sends in to her.

What, though, is all this grotesqueness for? Much of it smells of sour grapes: America is young and bustling, as England appeared to be when the author was himself young. In Waugh's America, all the young women look the same, all the young men struggle for money and money alone, and middle aged men end up alcoholic. Phoney respectability is big business, which is surely the main point of the Whispering Glades. The signs of respectability all come from Britain: the churches in its grounds, the lovers' seat with the Burns poem inscribed. Ambrose Abercrombie (Waugh hasn't lost his knack for comic names, at least) spends most of his energy attempting to prevent Hollywood's ex-pats from going native, not from any moral sense, but because it will devalue Englishness in the estimation of the studio bosses. Literally devalue: they won't pay so much for English writers or actors if they become too common, or if they fail to set themselves sufficiently apart from Americans. This isn't in itself too radical a vision of Hollywood: as frivolous, constituted of surfaces and borrowed effects. Who doesn't think this? From Evelyn Waugh though, who championed these qualities in the lives of his bright young things, it is a bit rich.

E. M. Forster – ‘Howards End’

Howards End is about the artistic temperament, and how it fits into a society of practical but unimaginative men. It’s about the conflict between art and society, and between art and life. It’s about personal morality and personal relations, and the difference between alert, alive relations and tired, inhibited ones. It says: some people are better than others. It says: practicality has some value, having built us our civilisation; impracticality more, because it knows (or can sense) how to live. It’s about the way people speak, and the things they unconsciously give away as they do so. It’s at once insubstantial, because it turns on events and situations which the outer world would not even recognise as such, and the stuff of life itself: its principal characters, the sisters Margaret and Helen Schlegel, are sustained through the buffeting of the life’s events (romantic entanglements, death, illness, the loss of their home) by the kind of inner life familiar to anyone who ever got past arguing with their siblings.

Anyone? Perhaps not. Howard’s End is nothing if not particular. It may generalise, and suggest extrapolations from its own depictions (Leonard Bast especially is more sign than character, with his poverty and aspirations, standing ‘at the extreme verge of gentility’ (p.31)), but it creates its own types to generalise about. It takes on what might be termed the morality of art, or of imagination, or of spirituality. A morality which does not say, it is wrong to smack a child and right to give to charity, but rather: it is wrong to grow up entirely, and right to contemplate. Margaret, for instance, feels the importance of houses (the book is named after the one she has the most affinity for), the space they give and the permanence. At a crisis point near the end of the book, Margaret and Helen, at Howards End, surrounded by furniture which has been moved from their old house at Wickham Place, and not knowing when they will see one another again nor how things exactly stand between them, silently decide to rearrange the chairs, and a healing process begins. The action signals a shared past and a shared sensibility. A similar but broader view is expressed in this passage:

The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde. We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty. (p. 107)

Howards End stands at the threshold of a new age, remarkably similar to the one at which we find ourselves 96 years on. Margaret’s – and the narrator’s – concerns about the loss of what makes life worthwhile (but which is impossible to tie down to a formula) chime perfectly with the internet age. One of them (I can’t find the exact quote) complains that London can stimulate but not sustain. Elsewhere the narrator says of her:

It is impossible to see modern life steadily and see it whole, and she had chosen to see it whole. (p. 115)

What has changed? The internet promotes content, the idea that all of human creation is at our fingertips. A click and a jiffy bag away. And so it is, but this at once precludes the possibility of seeing anything steadily, unless one is either extremely blinkered or has an iron will. How to find a calm island when all is flux? How to get to your own two individual feet when the ground won’t stay still? There’s no place like home anymore.

The Leonard Bast portion of the story felt at times like a slap in the face to this blog. Leonard is poor, and tries to educate himself by reading, and going to classical concerts. Only, he is too tired out by his work as an insurance clerk to give art the attention it needs – unlike the independently wealthy set with which most of the narrative is concerned. What am I doing here, if not ploughing through books in order to ward off the ill effects of a drudge job? It’s frustrating when tiredness gets the upper hand, but what are you going to do? Watch TV, go to the cinema, get your fiction compressed, is the 20^th Century’s answer. Hopefully I don’t make Leonard’s mistake of thinking books are the be-all and end-all. In another passage I can’t find he is criticised for missing the point that books are intended to illuminate life, they’re not, by and large, stone tablets to be taken seriously, unquestioningly, swallowed whole after meals.

I don’t know if I’ve got across how much I love this book. It was a surprise. I’m not new to Forster, but seem to have come to him the wrong way about: first with A Passage to India and Where Angels Fear to Tread, then after a gap of some years The Longest Journey and A Room with a View, after Zadie Smith wrote about him in The Guardian while she was writing On Beauty. It’s because that book’s on my shelf that I read this one now. Where the others were (increasingly in the order I read them) immaculate, pained, English, Howards End was, within about 30 pages, one of my favourite books. That slightly farcical opening reminded me of Wodehouse, more so than any of the daft situations people get into in the other books (e.g. Miss Quested’s cave escapade in A Passage to India). About all of them it could be said: great backgrounds, silly story. This is not a flaw, as Forster’s subject is the minutiae of English manners (especially with regard to flirting), and the terrible personal consequences which can spring from politeness and propriety. Howards End plays the silliness for laughs much more successfully than Forster manages elsewhere. His authorial voice is stronger, it makes sense for On Beauty (which is going to have a tough time measuring up to this) to be titled as though an essay, because Forster is arguing a point here. He is arguing for what he believes, about modern life, about inner life, about friendship, family, class, commerce, property. And it is an argument which, whilst beautifully made, is not going to win anybody over who was not already of a similar mind. It’s too individual, too unquantifiable. But if you want to know how to be happy, there are worse places to go for advice than Howards End.

Julian Barnes – ‘Arthur & George’

The appeal of Arthur & George is obvious, to anyone who likes Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur acts the sleuth! Barmy Sir Arthur, an engaging fellow who believed in fairies but managed to keep them out of the Holmes books, thankfully. Because they wouldn’t have fitted? Don’t be so sure: one aside here tells of the brief disappearance of Agatha Christie, during which our hero was called in to work his magic. Instead of applying pure deductive reasoning as one would usually understand it, he obtained a glove of Christie’s, and took it to a psychic, using the latter as a spiritual bloodhound. Arthur himself would, a little stubbornly perhaps, have failed to see the distinction. His point about Spiritualism was that it is just another science: why have advances in every other area of understanding, but leave spiritual knowledge at the level which was set 2000 years ago? Let’s get to the bottom of it! The objective truth!

It’s a queer argument, but one which fits perfectly with his character as set down here and elsewhere. Arthur is deeply respectful of society’s rules (especially English society’s rules) as he understands them, but – ironically – he understands the letter better than the spirit. Because the age says ‘progress!’ and because it is unquestionable that there is something to this religion business, he draws the skewed conclusion that religion should be turned into a science. He has a blind spot where it comes to the Church’s own rules, because they don’t fit in with his pet theory. A less respectful man (or a more modern one) would look at these rules and, disliking them, would turn to atheism and that would be that. Why is it unquestionable that there is something to this religion business? Because it’s traditional, it’s the rules.

Arthur has a similar approach to marriage: when his first wife Touie becomes an invalid through her tuberculosis, he eventually falls in love with the woman who is to be his second, Jean. They go on country walks together, they go arm in arm to the cricket, they arrange secretive meetings. This Arthur deems consistent with his idea of honour because the relationship is never consummated until Touie dies and they do eventually marry. It is put to him that this is just as bad as adultery because people will assume that she is his mistress on account of their public behaviour, but he can’t see it. Once again, two forces have collided within him, and rather than let one win, he makes things immensely more difficult for himself and everyone involved by letting both have their way: religion and science, marriage and love, Touie and Jean. He is a big man, he can encompass all.

George Edalji is not a big man, but he is a sensible one, and one also in thrall to rules. He is after all a solicitor, and the author of Railway Law for the “Man in the Train”. He serves two purposes here: as a foil to the more expansive Arthur, and as someone to whom occurs a series of unfortunate but interesting events. You’ll know the plot: some vicious anonymous notes are received, some horses are slashed, George takes the rap for wholly circumstantial reasons, and, out of gaol but robbed of his livelihood, Arthur steps in to shake things up a bit. Based on a true story, and pretty damn closely. George’s spell in gaol is comparable to Arthur and Jean’s interminable wait for legitimacy (and, not to put too fine a point on it, sex), but his equanimity is far greater. George, too, hopes to be married ‘in general’, which Arthur laughs at, recommending ‘in particular’ as the preferable state. Of course, he never is, and therefore has a much longer wait than Arthur in this regard (though equally, it’s harder to pine for a generality). The prosecution at his trial make much of George’s undoubted virginity, claiming the horse maimings to be the result of unfulfilled sexual longing. Here’s George musing on a different kind of abstention:

Abstention could be taken as proof either of moderation or extremity. It might be a sign of a fellow able to control his human urges; or equally of someone who resisted vice in order to concentrate his mind on other, more essential things – someone a touch inhuman, even fanatical. (p. 417)

The word ‘fanatical’ made me sit up – could Arthur & George, for all its painstaking Victorian / Edwardian-ness, be an allegory for our times? In part. While never less than fond of its protagonists, it mocks their reliance on rules, and shows how ludicrous things can follow from them, how government judgements can be fallible and political. The Home Office Report of the Gladstone Committee which fudges George’s eventual pardon can’t fail to bring to mind the more recent Hutton Report, and the Edalji case reminded people at the time of Drayfus. Justice the province of the press when official procedures prove unsatisfactory, and a popular patron can be found. And that can’t be right.

Julie Myerson - ‘Something Might Happen’

The day after I finished reading Something Might Happen, I walked past a Daily Record newspaper board which included the phrase ‘Murdered student’s sister opens her heart.’ Having been involved for the previous week in a story which revolves around a woman who is murdered in a car park and has her heart removed, my immediate thought was ‘Oh, they must have got it back then.’ Why would you open a heart, especially one belonging to your own dead sister? Then I got it, and felt a bit stupid. But it says something for the chilly, anti-normal atmosphere of the book that I considered this alternative interpretation of the headline for even a few seconds.

On TV, Julie Myerson is great. She’s my second favourite Newsnight Review pundit after Tom Paulin, but where he’s contrary, she filters bullshit. Other panellists attempt varying degrees objectivity; Julie is proudly subjective. If a book / film / whatever doesn’t say something to her about her life, it’s out. ‘But I just wasn’t interested’ is how she’ll begin the tirades which pop pretension and masculine drum banging alike. For her, art should be small scale, closely observed. I was curious how this aesthetic would come across in her own novels.

The answer is, pretty well. Something Might Happen is set in a quiet seaside town, and looks at the greater and lesser dalliances of narrator Tess, from within the confines of what seems a happy family life. The happiness is only implied, because all the action takes place against the recent murder of Tess’ best friend Lennie. Within the time frame of the book there is almost no happiness at all. Husband Alex (an ex of Tess’, and he still has a bit of a thing for her) is distraught, can barely function. The action concentrates almost exclusively on people who loved the murdered woman (Alex, Tess, Tess’ husband Mick, the children of both couples), and is correspondingly bleak. The bereavement is so recent and so horrific none of them can think straight. Factor in Alex’s continued interest in Tess, and Tess’ obsession with one of the murder investigation team, and you have one dark sticky death sex mess. Myerson’s aim seems to be to heap as much shit as she can on to her characters, to see if they’ll break. Or perhaps her point is that people don’t break, under the most awful of circumstances. They can’t be relied on not to fuck things up further, but most can get through this stuff.

My problem was, I kept wanting the book to lighten up. Given the above constraints, this is the last thing it was ever going to do, but I felt let down that Myerson resorted to the ‘Oh my God! A body!’ opening gambit. The whole Tess / Alex / Lennie / Lacey (the policeman Tess likes) thing would have been plenty for, say, Woody Allen to work on, without killing anybody. It’s perfectly possible to fall in love whilst already married without being pushed into it by a horrific murder. Why bring grief into the mix? Because grief is messy, I suppose, and people don’t stop inappropriately fancying each other when they’re afflicted by it. Or at least that’s the message here. I would have thought that they do, but anyway. I have two objections to the grief. Firstly, it smacks of ITV police dramas. Yer joyless Crackers and Prime Suspects, so unaccountably popular. As, in less fraught ways, are Casualty and even East Enders. I hate all these programmes. The police dramas, disgustingly forensic, have a story arc which takes the viewer from a) as bad as things could possibly be, pictures, to b) a bit better, but still worse than before whatever caused a) happened. I prefer story arcs which come out of the red occasionally. Bit of light, bit of shade.

Secondly, I’d like to bring in another terrible TV show, Dawson’s Creek. It tried to mask its considerable shallowness by adding the words ‘right now’ to the end of every self pitying teenage sentence, to max out the moment, make the characters’ pain vital by dragging it into the ultra present tense. In Something Might Happen, the phrase of choice is ‘I mean it.’ Every bloody conversation, the whole book long, somebody means it, and says so. It doesn’t do any good, they all lie to each other anyway.

Apart from that, I liked it.

Graham Rawle - ‘Woman’s World’

As is so often the case with hardback books, it’s taken me until the paperback came out to get around to reading Woman’s World. It’s been sitting prettily on my bookshelf preening itself in the mirror on the opposite wall since last Christmas. As well it might: this is a beautiful book. Composed entirely of cut-out fragments from early ’60s women’s magazines, stuck to the page in a single central column width, sprawling outwards on occasion, it’s more like a comic then a novel in its attention the minutiae of presentation. A Chris Ware comic, perhaps (there are doubtless better comparisons to be made, but I don’t read enough comics). Larger words from headlines signal moments of drama, the word ‘colour’ rarely appears without cross-hatching filling each letter, denoting - in black and white - an array of colours. Entire sentences are lifted from advertising copy, or romance stories, with more often than not a word transplanted near the end which elevates the sentiment to ludicrousness. An example:

Some secrets | should be shared, while those that may be harmful to a loved one | are best kept wrapped in | airtight parcels, using either plastic bags or thick brown paper sealed with plastic tape, with | a handful of mothballs | sprinkled between the layers of | deceit. (p. 377)

Rawle takes advantage of the magazines’ two dominant tones: mawkish (the romance stories) and sprightly, practical (the ads and the tips on how to run a household). Put them together and you’re going to get jokes, but not only jokes: the violent swings from one voice to the other produce a sense of instability which is appropriate for the mixed up narrator Norma. She’s so steeped in the woman’s world they offer that she can’t think in any other terms, but her regurgitated version of their content is peculiar. She takes them too seriously, yet doesn’t get them quite right.

Why are the cuttings all from the early ’60s? It gives a consistency of tone, of course: this is when the novel is set, they practically guarantee that there will be no anachronisms. It is a very readable tone, the language firmly entrenched in ’50s family values but from a time when the give-’em-what-they-want approach to media had started to kick in. Later magazines, you’d imagine, would have contained references to rock ’n’ roll and sexual liberation. The rigidity of what it meant to be a woman would have started to crumble, and it’s the rigidity on which Norma relies. There is a nostalgia for this lost age of domesticity, as an aspiration if not as a reality, and, simultaneously, a demonstration of how dangerous this kind of boxing-in is for those who submit to it. Of the small set of characters in the book, only Roy’s girlfriend Eve comes close to living up to the version of womanhood set out in Norma’s beloved magazines. She is accordingly quite bland, but unusually her character isn’t weakened by this, as it gives Rawle carte blanche to plunder romance stories for sparkling eyes and tremulous hearts (nothing so crude as a heaving bosom). It’s also true that Norma is so loopy that there is room for a stock character elsewhere in the story, and so Eve fulfils the function more usually taken by the narrator, of standing by and watching whilst extraordinary things happen.

The triumph of Woman’s World (rather like a Jeeves novel) is in its use of narration by a character who is not so much unreliable as completely out of control. The excitement and glamour in Norma’s life come exclusively from the fashion pages of her magazines, and she lives largely as a recluse, changing outfits three times a day but rarely taking them beyond the confines of the house she shares with her mother. When the door bell rings she’ll dash off to her room in a panic whilst her mother answers it. Once there, she’ll change outfits again. I’m aware that this makes her sound about as 3D as a Little Britain character, but the reasons this isn’t so are so bound up in things you ought to find out from reading the book. There is history, tragedy, all sorts. But best not spilled in advance.

Weird coincidental similarities with other books I’ve written about recently: Norma is rather like Kinué in The Decay of the Angel, in her self delusion relating to her own beauty. She also adds an uncertain ‘possibly’ to the occasional sentence, as unsure of her grip on reality as Alan Bennett’s lady in the van.