Arms and the Imagination: Essays on War, Politics, and Anglophone Culture

Many novels juxtaposed a present-day narrative with one set in the past. It also made extensive use of period pastiche, another enthusiasm of novelists toward the end of the 20th century. In addition to the interest in remote and recent history, a concern with tracing aftereffects became dominatingly present in fiction.

Most subtly and powerfully exhibiting this, Ian McEwan —who came to notice in the s as an unnervingly emotionless observer of contemporary decadence—grew into imaginative maturity with novels set largely in Berlin in the s The Innocent [] and in Europe in Black Dogs []. These repercussions are also felt in Last Orders , a masterpiece of quiet authenticity by Graham Swift , a novelist who, since his acclaimed Waterland , showed himself to be acutely responsive to the atmosphere of retrospect and of concern with the consequences of the past that suffused English fiction as the second millennium neared.

In its place emerged what came to be known with characteristic understatement as The Movement. Poets such as D. The preeminent practitioner of this style was Philip Larkin , who had earlier displayed some of its qualities in two novels: Jill and A Girl in Winter In contrast to the rueful traditionalism of their work is the poetry of Ted Hughes , who succeeded Betjeman as poet laureate — In extraordinarily vigorous verse, beginning with his first collection, The Hawk in the Rain , Hughes captured the ferocity, vitality, and splendour of the natural world.

It also shows a deep receptivity to the way the contemporary world is underlain by strata of history. This realization, along with strong regional roots, is something Hughes had in common with a number of poets writing in the second half of the 20th century. The work of Geoffrey Hill especially King Log [], Mercian Hymns [], Tenebrae [], and The Triumph of Love [] treats Britain as a palimpsest whose superimposed layers of history are uncovered in poems, which are sometimes written in prose. The dour poems of R. Thomas commemorate a harsh rural Wales of remote hill farms where gnarled, inbred celibates scratch a subsistence from the thin soil.

In collections such as Terry Street , Douglas Dunn wrote of working-class life in northeastern England. Tony Harrison , the most arresting English poet to find his voice in the later decades of the 20th century The Loiners [], From the School of Eloquence and Other Poems [], Continuous [] , came, as he stresses, from a working-class community in industrial Yorkshire.

Before this, three books of dazzling virtuosity The Onion, Memory [], A Martian Sends a Postcard Home [], and Rich [] established Raine as the founder and most inventive exemplar of what came to be called the Martian school of poetry. The defining characteristic of this school was a poetry rife with startling images, unexpected but audaciously apt similes , and rapid, imaginative tricks of transformation that set the reader looking at the world afresh.

From the late s onward Northern Ireland , convulsed by sectarian violence, was particularly prolific in poetry. Born into a Roman Catholic farming family in County Derry, he began by publishing verse—in his collections Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark —that combines a tangible , tough, sensuous response to rural and agricultural life, reminiscent of that of Ted Hughes, with meditation about the relationship between the taciturn world of his parents and his own communicative calling as a poet.

Having spent his formative years amid the murderous divisiveness of Ulster, he wrote poetry particularly distinguished by its fruitful bringing together of opposites. Sturdy familiarity with country life goes along with delicate stylistic accomplishment and sophisticated literary allusiveness. Surveying carnage, vengeance , bigotry , and gentler disjunctions such as that between the unschooled and the cultivated , Heaney made himself the master of a poetry of reconciliations.

The closing years of the 20th century witnessed a remarkable last surge of creativity from Ted Hughes after his death in , Andrew Motion , a writer of more subdued and subfusc verses, became poet laureate. In Birthday Letters , Hughes published a poetic chronicle of his much-speculated-upon relationship with Sylvia Plath , the American poet to whom he was married from until her suicide in Heaney impressively effected a similar feat in his fine translation of Beowulf Apart from the short-lived attempt by T.

Eliot and Christopher Fry to bring about a renaissance of verse drama, theatre in the late s and early s was most notable for the continuing supremacy of the well-made play , which focused upon, and mainly attracted as its audience, the comfortable middle class. The most accomplished playwright working within this mode was Terence Rattigan , whose carefully crafted, conventional-looking plays—in particular, The Winslow Boy , The Browning Version , The Deep Blue Sea , and Separate Tables —affectingly disclose desperations, terrors, and emotional forlornness concealed behind reticence and gentility.

An alternative reaction against drawing-room naturalism came from the Theatre of the Absurd. Through increasingly minimalist plays—from Waiting for Godot to such stark brevities as his second-long drama, Breath — Samuel Beckett used character pared down to basic existential elements and symbol to reiterate his Stygian view of the human condition something he also conveyed in similarly gaunt and allegorical novels such as Molloy [], Malone Dies [], and The Unnamable [], all originally written in French.

Sloane , Loot , and What the Butler Saw —put theatrical procedures pioneered by Pinter at the service of outrageous sexual farce something for which Pinter himself also showed a flair in television plays such as The Lover [] and later stage works such as Celebration [].

In plays from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to later triumphs such as Arcadia and The Invention of Love , Stoppard set intellectually challenging concepts ricocheting in scenes glinting with the to-and-fro of polished repartee. Irish dramatists other than Beckett also exhibited a propensity for combining comedy with something more sombre. Their most recurrent subject matter during the last decades of the 20th century was small-town provincial life. Their scenarios were remarkable for an uncompromising insistence on human cruelty and the oppressiveness and exploitativeness of capitalist class and social structures.

In the s agitprop theatre—antiestablishment, feminist, black, and gay—thrived. One of the more-durable talents to emerge from it was Caryl Churchill , whose Serious Money savagely encapsulated the finance frenzy of the s. David Edgar developed into a dramatist of impressive span and depth with plays such as Destiny and Pentecost , his masterly response to the collapse of communism and rise of nationalism in eastern Europe. David Hare similarly widened his range with confident accomplishment; in the s he completed a panoramic trilogy surveying the contemporary state of British institutions—the Anglican church Racing Demon [] , the police and the judiciary Murmuring Judges [] , and the Labour Party The Absence of War [].

Hare also wrote political plays for television, such as Licking Hitler and Saigon: Year of the Cat Trevor Griffiths, author of dialectical stage plays clamorous with debate, put television drama to the same use Comedians [] had particular impact. Alan Bennett excelled in both stage and television drama. Did common patterns of representing war affect the way it was experienced?

How did individual writers contribute towards the developments that have been identified in literary and cultural history? In the second half of this chapter, I try to give a preliminary answer to the last question through the example of one, in some ways, representative figure from the middle of the century, Thomas Penrose — Far from being mutually exclusive, the three approaches to eighteenth-century war writing—literary analysis, literary history and cultural history—overlap significantly.

The scholar engaged in literary analysis is often simultaneously concerned with literary and cultural history. Although there is usually a clear enough focus or emphasis to identify work as belonging to one of the three approaches, occasionally different interests seem to carry almost equal weight. Most commentaries can be placed more comfortably than his into one of the three approximate overlapping groups, and between them, these account for most of the recent work on eighteenth-century war literature. What follows does not attempt to be a comprehensive survey of that work but rather a sketch of the principal lines of enquiry and argument of the last two decades.

The eighteenth century does not, as already noted, offer many examples of the kind of complex, sustained, and nuanced account of the experience of war that has become familiar from War and Peace, Catch 22 , the Sword of Honour trilogy, and twentieth-century war poetry. Ruth Mack reads the former in terms of the narration of individual experience in relation to history. She does this by finding in the war rhetoric of contemporary memoirs and manuals an unspoken assumption of the fear and uncertainty of ordinary soldiers. Eighteenth-century literature is richer in public responses to war, and to particular wars, than in subjective accounts of it.

With a different approach and interest, David Francis Taylor also looks at Sheridan but concentrates chiefly on parodies of his plays produced in America.

In doing so, Taylor is entering the vast undergrowth of minor eighteenth-century literature about war. The two points he makes are both instructive: Seward and Sheridan take contemporary war as an explicit theme. Perhaps more interesting than either on this subject is one major text, which was mostly written and published during a war, features two veteran soldiers among its principal characters, and eschews direct comment on war.

But Carol Watts, in her book, The Cultural Work of Empire , which is admittedly more about cultural history than Sterne, tries to establish a consonance between new subjectivities being formed by imperial war and the imaginative worlds of Tristram Shandy and other works by Sterne. But the puzzle is that in other respects the two aging veterans are not presented as heartless. Whatever else Tristram Shandy achieves, it shows more clearly than perhaps any earlier text the encroachment of foreign conflict into the local and domestic.

A back-garden bowling green, the most homely of spaces, becomes a miniature replica of the fortified towns that were besieged and battered during the War of the Spanish Succession. Some scholars have fruitfully addressed a different kind of encroachment, that of military tropes and themes into domestic fiction. The reading uses context to explain what the novel means rather than embedding the novel in a context.

This is a rich vein of inquiry, and Favret has developed it further in her important book, War at a Distance. Some of the scholars already mentioned frame their discussions of texts in wider developments of literary and cultural history. Others address these developments in a more concentrated way. Some scholars approach the topic in terms of the connections between literary, political, and social history.

Some scholars read war writing more in terms of politicized than political history. Watts is one example, with the connection she draws between the sensibility of Tristram Shandy and that of the emerging empire. Suvir Kaul is another. A slightly different approach has been to expand the range of texts and objects that can be read as representing empire and the military power that seized and held it.

These studies do not always deal with literary representation, but they do broaden our understanding of representation in general and the place of literary texts in that. Although he does not extend his reading to more literary texts, it would be useful to examine whether and how that tension exists in them as well.

This is a question that has not as yet been much discussed in relation to the eighteenth century. And he seeks the patterns in cultural production that demonstrate this implicit thesis. His book is a tremendous piece of cultural history—extensive, insightful, and entertaining at once. But the drawback of the method is to seek and find patterns and articulate them with a sureness that ignores or elides exceptions and human mess. Literary and cultural history looks for trends. Notwithstanding its obvious merits, such an approach has the tendency to corral heterogeneous human reality into a homogenizing pattern and, in the process, to minimize differences, reduce tensions, and flatten bumps.

As well as belonging to larger movements in literary and cultural history, poems, plays, and novels often enunciate deep feelings and deeply held ideas, try to reconcile or balance the tensions and contradictions among these, and attempt to give shape and order to amorphous and difficult experience. To be sure they can be legitimately used as documentary evidence of cultural development, but their peculiar quality and value lies in the imaginative struggle they record and enact with ephemeral experience and intractable reality.

Sometimes it also lies in a unique contribution they make to the developing range of possibilities of representation. Literary history is the product of individual writers as well as of larger trends and pressures. Close attention to minor authors allows us to understand the nature and source of changes and developments in a concrete and specific way, impossible for more general literary histories. Thomas Penrose — makes an interesting case study. His small body of poetry, much of it about war, is both of its time and of its author.

Penrose drew upon the resources of contemporary poetry and his own imagination in order to understand war and his experience of it. Different elements of those resources were in tension or contradiction with one another. And the desires to find meaning and excite feelings about war sit next to knowledge of the scale and anonymity of modern warfare. Eight of the twenty-seven poems he left behind are unfinished, and even his most famous poem does not achieve an imaginative apprehension comparable to what we recognize as major war writing.

In it, Penrose created a new way of imagining war that was to be highly influential among later writers. The question is how he managed to make this contribution. Penrose is in some ways a representative, educated man from the middle of the century. He was a graduate of Hertford College, Oxford, a country clergyman, apparently an affectionate husband, a man of somewhat melancholy temper, and in true English eccentric fashion a collector of ancient coins. The first group, three of which were published as a small volume entitled Flights of Fancy in , comprises six ancient British rhapsodies in an early Gothic style and were clearly influenced by Collins and Thomas Gray.

The Address was probably published in and belongs to the public response to the newly begun American War of Independence, to which Penrose also contributed a sermon. Most of these are exercises in midcentury sentiment, with more glances toward the Gothic; though they are not without merit, they offer little that is new. But the influence began earlier than the Romantics. The extended form of the novel allows Pratt to wring more sentiment from the battlefield discovery than Penrose could in a lyric poem.

The repeated cameo scene of the officer watching a soldier die is, for instance, the most characteristic feature of First World War poetry, both patriotic and antipatriotic. Penrose did not, of course, single-handedly forge a new way of imaginatively understanding war, but he did provide a useful trope and contribute significantly toward a broader development. As well as having written one original poem, Penrose was different from other contemporary writers in a further respect. With the exceptions of Smollett and Philip Freneau in America, few of those who wrote imaginatively about war in the eighteenth century had experienced it.

The Annual Register for tells the story of the expedition. He and his men had high hopes of success and approached the attack in carnival mood. The only consolation the writer could find in the event was that a number of brave British seamen, unable to swim and facing certain death, spent their last moments maintaining a return fire against the Spanish. Penrose was stationed on another ship, the Ambuscade , during the engagement.

As an officer of marines, he would have helped organize the optimistic, vainglorious display of red-coated soldiers on the poops and tops. When the Lord Clive caught fire, neither the Ambuscade nor the rest of the squadron could do anything to help it and its men. With the rest of the ruined fleet, he and the Ambuscade fled the battle, defeated, to struggle northward up the coast to the safety of Rio de Janiero.

It is impossible to know what drove this Oxford undergraduate to leave his books and join a private expedition against a Spanish New World colony in the dying years of a war. His family seems an unlikely source for dreams of military glory and privateering wealth. From the little evidence we have, his father was a strict moralist, with definite views on duty in time of war and on the kind of character desirable in fighting men. In a sermon preached to his parish on December 18, , with the Jacobites having begun their retreat from Derby less than a fortnight earlier, he urged the value of fasting and abstinence in times of national danger.

Despite this father, Penrose chose not only to fight but to fight on board a privateer. In the early years of the war, there had been a concerted pamphlet campaign to try to improve the public image of privateers. One writer, for instance, couched the legal wrangle between Spain and a group of privateers over a prize, the Penthievre , in highly patriotic terms. Spain was neutral until January , and should, in principle, have recognized the right of British privateers to their prizes.

But no amount of rhetorical afflatus could hide the fact that privateering was a form of legalized piracy. The author possibly Defoe of the famous compendium of piratical lives from earlier in the century had made the connection between the encouragement of privateering during war and the flourishing of piracy during peace. The most immediate but not necessarily convincing piece of evidence is a poem written just before the battle to the woman he had left in England and who was later to become his wife.

In , he took a rather more sombre view. When Lord Marchmain marries a Catholic and becomes one himself, he tells his wife: Apart from the elder son, who remains faithful to the letter of Catholicism and of family traditions, the Marchmains are destroyed by the conflicting pressures of their nature and their religion. Still, she has accomplished the one thing that matters: This is an important aspect of the novel: Rex, a successful politician, wants to marry Julia Marchmain because he hopes to acquire through her an aristocratic veneer which would help him in his career.

Describing him years later, Julia says:. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole, p. In Brideshead Revisited he appears to be fascinated by the accumulated beauty and the detached cultivation of aesthetic pleasure which only a long tradition of great wealth makes possible and enjoyable without reservation.

The privileges of the aristocracy are obviously justified when they live up to the standards which were originally theirs. When they allow chaos and confusion to invade their lives and their houses, they are responsible for their own downfall and also for the decline of civilization. When Ryder, just back from South America, hears that Anchorage House is being pulled down, his only comment is: Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity. Sebastian initiates Ryder in architecture and wine tasting; cosmopolitan Anthony Blanche initiates him in modern poetry by reciting The Waste Land.

Both reveal to Ryder the beauty and richness of the world through the care-free but fruitful experiences of adolescence:. Looking back, now, after twenty years, there is little I would have left undone or done otherwise … all the wickedness of that time was like the spirit they mix with the pure grape of the Douro, heady stuff full of dark ingredients; it at once enriched and retarded the whole process of adolescence as the spirit checks the fermentation of the wine, renders it undrinkable, so that it must lie in the dark, year in, year out, until it is brought up at last fit for the table.

The promise was never fulfilled partly because of the dispersion of the Flytes and his estrangement from them, partly through his own failure in later years to marry Julia and become the holder of Brideshead, but ultimately because the beauty and refinement of civilized life have been destroyed by the Hoopers of this world. That men born in families famous for their past achievement should make way for the beneficiaries of a potential Welfare State is utterly unacceptable to the author. The wish to recall and immortalize an ideal way of life before it was finally destroyed for the sake of Hooper is an important motive in the novel.

Here is Ryder remembering the idyllic time he spent at Brideshead as a young man:. The languor of Youth — how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the gene-rous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth — all save this — come and go with us through life.

These things are a part of life itself; but languor — the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding — that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

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Perhaps in the mansions of Limbo the heroes enjoy some such compensation for their loss of the Beatific Vision; perhaps the Beatific Vision itself has some remote kinship with this lowly experience; I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead. Thus in the dark hour before reveille I sometimes pondered: He was the acid test of all these alloys.

The advance of Hooper has been held up at several points. However willing he may be to believe in the reality and importance of these questions, the non-Catholic reader is not made to understand them nor to accept the way in which they are solved by the characters. What Waugh does make clear is that the rejection of religion, of Catholicism in particular, is a source of confusion and corruption.

The savagery of modern society has grown out of a return to Paganism. When Julia Flyte apostatizes in order to marry a barbarian like Rex Mottram, she allows disorder to set in her life. What matters is the preservation of an essential truth which is a condition to peace, order and the harmonious exercise of traditional values. His fear lest these values should be sacrificed to the welfare of barbarians pervades Brides-head Revisited. Political events of the period are referred to in order to illustrate the stupidity and lack of insight of Rex and his political friends:.

They tried to put him in to prepare air bases to bomb France. That bluff has been called, anyway. The people are with him.

The futility of what they say is the more striking as these men become Cabinet Ministers at the beginning of the War. The only time when Ryder himself takes an interest in social and political events is when the General Strike breaks out. Ryder and Mulcaster, rather drunk after a round of night clubs, decide to show their patriotism:. Other chaps fought, millions of them dead. All good chaps like the dead chaps. It was as though a beast long fabled for its ferocity had emerged for an hour, scented danger, and slunk back to its lair.

The First World War and the spirit of bravery it evoked haunt all his immature heroes; that spirit is the product of a class who courageously sacrificed its youth for the sake of insignificant commoners. These men must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines vermin by right of law, to be shot off at leisure so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures. Messinger tells him in the Brazilian jungle: In his pre-war novels they are engaged in their irresponsible antics and seem to be unaware of time; then they suddenly become elated when they realize that they will have their and their share of glory!

Waugh belongs to a generation who were too young to fight in the First World War and repeatedly expressed a wish to make up in some way for the opportunity they had missed of serving their country. At the beginning of the War when his sister imagines him as Siegfried Sassoon, T. He betrays his friend Ambrose Silk, then sends him away to Ireland and settles in his apartment. I have an idea I shall rather enjoy it. Waugh fails to make real the revival of responsibility among the upper classes: Hence, the ambiguity of the novel and the impossibility to take Peter, Alastair or Basil seriously even at the end.

In all the pre-war novels he is a prominent member of the Mayfair coterie; he betrays Paul Pennyfeather, becomes the lover of Margot Metroland, goes on rackets with Basil even after his marriage. He now reappears as an old acquaintance whom the author seems to have always loved. It was not the business of any politician to tell him when or how he should fight. It sounds awfully unlike him, but he was a much odder character than anyone knew.

You remember that man who used to dress as an Arab and then went into the air force as a private because he thought the British Government had let the Arabs down. I forget his name but there were lots of books about him. Well, I believe Alastair felt like that. Though how he could blame himself for Hitler I never quite saw.

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It is worth quoting the passage in which Sonia agrees to let him join them:. They go across to France and creep up behind Germans and cut their throats in the dark. A man in his regiment is raising one. He says I can be one of his section commanders; they can fix me up with a commission apparently. They carry rope ladders and files sewn in the seams of their coats to escape with. These novels are written in the same style as Brideshead Revisited , though their sentimentality is tempered by a humorous portrayal of army life.

Like Alastair and Basil, Guy Crouchback is thirty-six when the War breaks out; he has suffered and lived in solitude for eight years, but he is not more mature than they are. At first he is exalted by the army; he is proud of the traditions of his regiment and enjoys at last what he missed as a boy: Both are unhappy because they are married to frivolous women who are bored with their gentlemanly behaviour. Both have a slow and unhappy career in the army because they bear the blame for mistakes which they have not committed and they stick to the rules and to their ideals even if it makes them unpopular; both allow themselves to be exploited by ambitious officers who receive all the honours, while their own position at the end of the War is hardly honourable.

Guy is as chivalrous as Tietjens towards his former wife, and he remarries her when she is with child by a commoner. However, as early as Tietjens is fully aware that his public-school code of honour is outdated; though he does not approve of it, he sees the social evolution as inevitable, and his strength as a hero derives from his understanding of his predicament in a changing world. Guy simply blames the world for not being what he had imagined. To him, it is an alliance with democracy and therefore with the enemies of civilization; this tragic alliance will finally destroy what remains of the English cultural and social tradition.

There is no doubt that these views were fully shared, and approved of, by Waugh. Like the sixteenth-century martyr Edmund Campion, Guy associates the will to serve England with the will to serve God through Catholicism since he believes the real English tradition to be Catholic. Waugh makes this clear by describing the military careers of Ivor Claire and Trimmer.

Guy remembered Claire as he first saw him in the Roman spring in the afternoon sunlight amid the embosoming cypresses of the Borghese Gardens, putting his horse faultlessly over the jumps, concentrated as a man in prayer. Ivor Claire, Guy thought, was the fine flower of them all. He was quintessential England, the man Hitler had not taken into account, Guy thought. This is the end of all illusions for Guy, who has just heard of the invasion of Russia:. It was just such a sunny, breezy Mediterranean day two years before when he read of the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off; the modern age in arms.

Trimmer is made a hero by the astute Ian Kilbannock:. But not about your racket, Guy. Delightful fellows, heroes too, I daresay, but the Wrong Period. Went out with Rupert Brooke. The upper classes are on the secret list. We want heroes of the people, to or for the people, by, with and from the people. He is called Gervase after Gervase Crouchback, the martyr. Similarly, to think that officers do not behave gallantly or gentlemen honourably because honour and courage are meaningless in a democratized society is preposterous.

Waugh fails to make his position acceptable because the man who stands for the noble values of the aristocracy is Guy Crouchback, whose sole ambition at forty is to resemble a childhood hero! Though we sympathize with Guy, again because he is a victim, he hardly qualifies as the ideal gentleman; one expects more maturity and efficiency from the rulers of the world than he is capable of.

Yet he is not satirized at any moment: On one side stood the Crouchbacks and certain inconspicuous, anciently allied families; on the other side stood the rest of mankind, Box-Bender, the Butcher, the Duke of Omnium whose onetime wealth derived from monastic spoils , Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain; — all of a piece together. Crouch-back acknowledged no monarch since James II. However, for Guy, the War is not a fruitless experience: A Jew, whose life he has saved, explains this to him:. It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war.

These communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed.

They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. I knew Italians — not very many perhaps — who felt this. Were there none in England? At once a detractor and an admirer of the English upper classes, he caricatures their behaviour with the same dash and insolence that he prizes in their younger members.

Individual frivolity and social chaos are the object of his satire. Caught in a reckless round of pleasure-seeking, his unthinking and irresponsible Bright Young Things are quite a match for their stupid and grotesque elders. National, social and religious institutions are profaned with gusto or indiference, traditions violated, and the notions of service and duty ignored or misunderstood. Life is crude and uncivilized, seldom more than a senseless and cruel game.

The innocent who enters it, whether willingly or not, is inevitably victimized, though his fate is not quite undeserved as it usually results from his simple-minded notions of right and wrong. Waugh has achieved a remarkable feat by presenting bad or mad characters without making them unattractive. The ambivalence of his approach is just perceptible enough to be disturbing; the ambiguity of his early novels is a challenging element because his half-concealed sympathy for the Bright Young Things combines with perfect detachment in the description of their antics or of the more general insanity and cruelty of the world.

Moral justice is conspicuously absent from his novels but his point is precisely that there is no moral justice in actual life.

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His characters do typify current attitudes however fantastic these appear. Indeed, Waugh criticizes modern society by presenting slightly distorted and self-satirizing pictures of it. He scarcely emphasizes the eccentric behaviour of his models. Like Firbank, he presents them in disconnected conversation scenes which give his fiction a rapid and disjointed tempo suggestive of the hectic rhythm of modern life. There is little doubt that he was influenced by him: His early work seems paradoxical because he chastises a social class whom he otherwise considers as the rightful keepers of an order of which he wholly approves.

As a political conservative, Waugh satirizes society in the name of the established order and of its traditions.

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As a Roman Catholic, he satirizes it in the name of faith. The barbarism which he derides so comically in his novels is the inevitable effect of a return to paganism and is as destructive in the so-called advanced countries as in the African jungle. The absence of a clearly defined purpose in life illustrates the confusion bred by agnosticism or religious indifference, while a simple-minded belief in man results in ignorance of evil. In these aspects of his criticism, Waugh achieves universality of a kind. Unfortunately, his satire is limited by his assumption that values, whether social, moral, or religious, are a matter of class.

Just as the Catholic aristocracy in his later novels are saved by divine grace, so the upper-class trouble-makers of his early satires are redeemed by a social grace, which sometimes mars his humour and explains why Waugh is so much more tolerant of these trouble-makers than of social outsiders. Except for The Loved One , his post-war work is often marred by the sentimentality with which he celebrates the aristocracy and deplores their decline. His vision of English life became very pessimistic when he realized that the civilization they stood for was doomed.