Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Waugh dropped out of university without completing a degree. He never considered himself an “intellectual”—in fact he found this very notion utterly outlandish. At first he wanted to become a painter, and then thought of taking up carpentry or printing. When he finally came to literature he approached it like a craft , and retained this unconventional attitude all his life. Quite late in his career, to a literary journalist who had asked if his fiction was supposed to convey some “message,” he gave this characteristic answer: “No, I wish to make a pleasant object. I think any work of art is something exterior to oneself, it is the making of something, whether it’s a bed table or a book.”

Such a conception, which would naturally occur to a painter, sculptor, an engraver or a cabinet-maker, does not normally come to a writer, and we can perhaps find here a clue to the strikingly concrete quality of his writing. (It should be noted, by the way, that terms such as “abstract” and “abstraction” are used by him in an invariably pejorative sense.) Without a solid ground from which to rebound, imagination cannot soar; fantasy peters out in a vacuum; humour, waywardness, whimsicality quickly become tedious if developed in arbitrary isolation from the objective world. If Waugh’s invention is permanently throwing off sparks, it is because it always operates within the hard-edged frame of reality, and his wildest fantasies are always subjected to the discipline of a most rigorous structure. When A Handful of Dust was first published, old Belloc immediately detected this exceptional quality of craftsmanship. He wrote to Waugh: “I could not let it go… It is really a remarkable thing, and it owes this quality to construction , which today is in prose as rare as virtue. Every word is right and in its right place, so that the effect is a maximum for the material employed.”

Actually, the way in which Waugh manipulates language is akin to the poetic mode of literary creation: his is first of all an art of words . This is the reason why poetry, by its very nature, is essentially untranslatable — or to put it in a different form, any piece of literature is translatable only inasmuch as what it says can be dissociated from the way in which it is being said. In a poem, these two aspects are indivisible: if the poem is really good, displace one word and the entire piece collapses. A poem cannot exist outside the words in which it originally became incarnate, any more than a person could survive outside his own skin. In this respect, Waugh once made a very revealing criticism of Graham Greene’s use of language: “[Greene’s] is not a specifically literary style at all. The words are functional, devoid of sensuous attraction, of ancestry and of independent life. Literary stylists regard language as intrinsically precious, and its proper use as a worthy and pleasant task. A polyglot could read Mr. Greene, lay him aside, retain a sharp memory of all he said and yet, I think, entirely forget what tongue he was using. The words are simply mathematical signs for his thought.” Indeed, it would not be impossible to impart the gist of The Power and The Glory to someone who had not read the book, simply by re-telling it in other words, whereas it would be absurd and pointless to attempt the same exercise with Decline and Fall .

“The written word obsessed Waugh,” Martin Stannard notes in his biography, “and in this he lived entirely. Words on paper were to him almost tactile, malleable, subject to control. He thought in words, in perfect sentences.” A young American scholar who visited him in his country residence retained a vivid memory of an inscription which he found in the bathroom affixed upon the cistern of the toilet; handwritten and initialled E.W., the notice provided instructions on how to operate the toilet’s faulty flush:

The handle should return to the horizontal when the flow of water ceases. Should it fail to do so, agitate gently until it succeeds.

One feels as if the exquisite precision of the wording was designed to overcome the chaos and the rebelliousness of brute things. Waugh would have fully appreciated the famous anecdote from the life of a great Chinese calligrapher: as a ferocious tiger was terrorising a certain corner of the country, at the request of the local population, the calligrapher wrote a large inscription: TIGERS NOT WELCOME . The sheer magnificence of his calligraphy had such authority that the beast relented and left the district.

“Literature is simply the appropriate use of language”—Waugh made this striking and characteristic statement in a letter to Ann Fleming at the very end of his career. It sums up neatly his aesthetic principles, but should not be misconstrued as some sort of formalist manifesto. On the contrary, for him “the appropriate use of language both implied and guaranteed the proper functioning of a right mind.” Aesthetics is a form of ethics, as he made clear in his rebuke of John Mortimer’s views: “‘Many writers [Mortimer says] are not very good at anything except writing, and the value of their work is often not to be judged by the quality of their thoughts.’ But writing is the expression of thought. There is no abstract writing. All literature implies moral standards and criticisms.”

On a superficial level, Waugh’s views may seem contradictory: on the one hand, he multiplies statements such as “I have no psychological interest… I regard writing not as an investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed”—and, on the other hand, he emphatically rejects the possibility of a form of “abstract writing.” Stannard finely analyses the deeper coherence of his attitude: “At the root of Waugh’s pronouncements, there is something much simpler and, at the same time, infinitely more complex: the terror of Babel. One thing alone, in Waugh’s view, kept men sane: the sense of unified, agreed meaning. Ultimately this ‘meaning’ was God. In temporal terms, it was language. The post-structuralist notions of the (almost) infinite plurality of meaning would have been anathema to him: that way lay Picasso and Finnegans Wake … Waugh looked on his books as independent systems of order in a nightmare existence.” In this sense, the order of words established by the writer’s pen would keep madness at bay, as the Chinese calligrapher’s brush could chase tigers away.

Waugh would certainly have subscribed to Samuel Johnson’s moving utterance: “Of the uncertainties of our present state, the most dreadful and alarming is the uncertain continuance of reason.” The fear of incipient lunacy seems to have haunted him recurrently. On a creative level, a more benign form of his “madness” expressed itself as an ability to turn all reality into private fantasy. As a protective device against the bruising contact of life, he was determined to see events and people as a fiction from which he was separate. (In this sense, of course, there may be an element of mild schizophrenia at the source of all creative writing — after all, art is a desperate attempt to make a cruel reality a little less intolerable.) Without detracting in the least from Waugh’s well-known courage, one may even wonder to what extent his fearlessness in front of all sorts of dangers (during the war, for instance, he constantly displayed a bravery that bordered at times on downright recklessness) was not also rooted in his imaginative powers and in his capability to cut himself off from reality in order to become a detached spectator of his own predicament. The same mechanisms of imagination which produce feelings of panic, can also — if guided by a forceful will — generate courage.

In everyday life, Waugh was constantly casting acquaintances and friends into fantastic roles, and generally turning the people he met into characters in a private charade; often he would use this myth-making talent to hilarious effect. A good illustration is provided, for instance, by his visit to the great poet Paul Claudel. The majestic patriarch of Catholic letters — a genius of immense authority — had invited Waugh and Christopher Sykes to have lunch in his Paris apartment. This is how Waugh related the meeting in his diary: