William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

The section of Sword of Honour that deals with Crete is a magnificent and chilling tour de force. As a chronicle of military incompetence and absurdity it rivals Catch 22 as a bitter indictment of men at war. It is also a fascinating example of Waugh’s method, of how he turned his experience into fiction.

Waugh, like Guy Crouchback, arrived in Crete as the British and Empire forces were in full and shambolic retreat from the invading German army. The Commandos were ordered to provide the rearguard to protect the embarking men on the beach head. Under almost constant air attack somehow large numbers of the army were taken off by the navy. Waugh and the Commandos watched with alarm. As the clock ticked down it was apparent that there was not enough room on the boats and many would have to surrender.

Waugh’s commanding officer — whom he revered — Colonel Robert Laycock, dictated a false statement and had Waugh write in the war diary that he had ordered his men to evacuate Crete, “in view of the fact that …there was no enemy contact.” This was patently false: serious fighting was still going on in the hills, but Laycock ordered his men to abandon the rearguard positions, embark and thereby escape. After their departure many hundreds of soldiers were captured by the Germans. Waugh was complicit in this blatant disregard of orders and he felt the shame deeply, talking of “my ignominious flight,” and “my bunk from Crete.”

In the novel everything is subtly different. First, the character based on Laycock — Colonel Tommy Blackhouse — conveniently breaks his leg on a destroyer approaching Crete and never even lands on the island. Instead the man who ignominiously flees is the idealized, aristocratic warrior, Ivor Claire, whom Guy idolizes. Guy refuses to disobey orders and escapes in a small boat rather than surrender. But learning later of Ivor Claire’s desertion brings about Guy’s potent disillusion with the army. Ivor Claire bears all the guilt that Waugh felt himself at his duplicitous escape from Crete. Guy behaves with honour throughout but, when he learns of Ivor’s cowardice, his love affair with the army and all things military is effectively over.

As always with Waugh, he was brutally honest with himself. When Officers and Gentlemen was first published Guy’s last day on Crete is described as “fatal”—the day on which he resigned “an immeasurable piece of his manhood.” This makes no sense: Guy has done nothing wrong, but the words represent the true measure of Waugh’s own feelings about the incident. The sentence was excised from the later omnibus edition.

When Officers and Gentlemen was published (dedicated to Laycock) Waugh’s inner circle knew the facts. Ann Fleming, a close friend, waspishly telegrammed to Waugh “Presume Ivor Claire based Laycock dedication ironical.” Waugh denied this absolutely: “if you suggest such a thing anywhere,” he wrote back, “it will be the end of our beautiful friendship … Just shut up about Laycock. Fuck you. E. Waugh.”

The autobiographical facts — and Waugh’s personal agony — underpin the fiction and explain its particular power and vehemence. Guy Crouch-back, like Waugh, wanted to go to war — it was a just war and he was zealous for battle — but everything he experienced resulted in bitter disillusion and disappointment.

It is this element in Waugh — his fundamental and unsparing honesty — that I find so compelling and admirable. The various poses and images of himself that Waugh presented to the world were deliberately provocative, not to say deliberately preposterous. Whether he is acting the choleric Tory squire, or the Victorian paterfamilias, or the Pall Mall clubman; whether he is expounding on his hatred of all things modern or displaying his near-manic adherence to the Catholic Church and the aristocratic values of county house life — almost everything is calculated to challenge and offend, to draw down, it would seem, the inevitable accusations of social-climbing, class-hatred, snobbery and affectation.

But nobody was more aware of the sham and the bogus than Waugh. His late self-portrait in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold proves beyond doubt that he knew himself better than anyone. And the same unblinking candour informs his dark, comic vision also. He saw the world and its denizens with absolute clarity and devastating unsentimentality — nowhere more so than in Sword of Honour —and displayed the nature of the human condition with almost gleeful ruthlessness. This is what makes him, I think, an enduringly modern spirit — however paradoxical that adjective might seem — and explains why his books have lasted so well and will continue to survive.

2001

There’s a fine, near-classic example behind King’s Cross Station, and there’s a particularly austere — brutally austere — one in Hounslow. If you’re looking for down and out seedy there’s a beauty on the Old Kent Road, guaranteed to set the soul in a slow slide of despair. For pure grease, however, the air peppery and astringent with fat fumes, there’s one I frequent in Notting Hill and on the Gray’s Inn Road there’s a monster — London’s version of La Coupole , as it were — with a venerable history of some few decades.

I’m talking, of course, about that great, possibly obsolescent British institution — the Caff. “Cafe” seems far too classy an appellation, too foreign. “Greasy spoon” somehow recalls the 1930s American Depression to me, or a truckers’ halt — the semantics is not quite right. We say, don’t we, “I’m off down to the caff,” or “See you in the caff in half an hour” and the word seems just about perfect — bluntly anglicized, demotic, accentless, unpretentious, apt. Whether you’re in Aberdeen or Guildford, Norwich or Durham, you know exactly, precisely what you’re going to get — in terms of ambience and nourishment — when you call a place a “caff.”

Forget pubs, the British caff is our true and enduring culinary landmark. You can find a flawless replica pub in Prague or Barcelona, these days. Pubs have gone up-market, are franchised, themed. The caff resists this gentrification doggedly and triumphantly. They exist nowhere else, indeed no other country in the world would want them. They remain irreducibly ours. Ignored, despised, avoided, unrecorded, unclassified, guide-free, the caff clings on in all corners of our cities and towns, an enduring testimonial to our indifference to comfort, our bad taste, our appalling eating habits and our complete lack of savoir-vivre .

When I was researching my latest novel, Armadillo , which is set entirely in London, my travels around the city took me to many of these bleak estaminets, these gloomy watering holes, and I spent long hours in them, observing the traffic of customers, gingerly eating and drinking, making notes. I went into them initially in a spirit of anthropological curiosity, but the more time I spent, caff-dwelling, the more a form of creeping affection for them grew in me. Feelings of hygienic distaste, of mild shame, gave way to sneaking admiration, of almost pride. Who else could have evolved such a dauntingly rebarbative institution? What did it say about us as a people, a nation? Surely, I reasoned, here was some form of pure objective correlative for us, the British, one untouched by hand of marketing man, design team, tourist board or whatever. Here lay — in gustatory terms at least — a small quintessence of our national psyche.

This increasing familiarity with and affection for the caff grew into a near-obsession. I started seeking out more and more examples, subspecies and hybrid types, started pestering my friends for their local variations. I even gave my central character in the novel — who also spent a lot of time caff-bound — a similar fixation. He started — let’s be honest, I started — to evolve a crude taxonomy, writing prime exemplars down in a notebook under the rubric “Great British Caffs.” Like some latter-day Linnaeus, my protagonist set about distinguishing the true from the bogus, steadily evolving criteria for a more exact classification, beginning to understand what fitted the bill — what was an echt -caff, an über -caff — and what fell short of the archetype.