William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

Waugh was received into the Catholic Church in 1930 after the humiliation of the collapse of his first marriage. He was, by all accounts, a diligent and sincere neophyte but the religiosity that makes its first pronounced appearance in Brideshead is absent from the three comedies he published in the decade following his conversion. The world of the comedies is, in effect, Godless. Indeed one might claim that it is a precondition of comedy that it is, covertly or not, atheistical: based on the premise that no omnipotent god could possibly have created or be responsible for the ghastly and rebarbative world we live in. However, Waugh’s developing obsession with his faith meant that the comedy in his work becomes intermittent and less successful: it lacks the cool, gimlet-eyed dispassion of the earlier works. As Waugh’s novels became more self-consciously serious — as God entered the frame — so they began to creak and sag.

Perhaps this was inevitable. Waugh is the most autobiographical of fiction writers and as he reached middle age so he began to be afflicted by melancholia and taedium vitae . Only his unbending religious beliefs offered him any kind of support. His son Auberon speculated that perhaps his father might actually have been clinically depressed — though he would never have admitted it and indeed the only medication he permitted himself for his condition was regular large measures of gin and lemon barley water.

In his writing life a similar zeal attached itself to the concept of style. Waugh saw himself as a craftsman whose medium was the English language: someone responsible for shaping a coherent sentence, choosing the exact words to convey the exact meaning the author implied. No language was richer and more suited to the task than English—“The most lavish and delicate which mankind has ever known.” And Waugh is a consummate artist but within a particularly confined manner of English prose — he strove to write in an almost mock-Augustan idiom, sometimes beautiful and classically severe but sometimes verging on parody where too many Latinate orotundities tend to bleed the life from the fiction. As Thomas Hardy once tellingly remarked, “If you want to have a living style then it’s important not to have too much style.”

In this centenary year of Waugh’s birth, therefore, I feel it’s necessary to push to one side the image of Waugh the tweeded, social-climbing bully, and even Waugh the self-appointed guardian of the English language. Why we continue to read Waugh is why we are drawn to all great novelists: namely that in their fiction they tell us truths about our human nature and the human condition. Waugh’s perfect medium in this endeavour was comedy and what made his comedy so alluring in the 1930s is as true in 2003 as it was then. Reflecting on his father’s life and its litany of hostilities and antagonisms, Auberon Waugh wrote how sad that it should have been so when “one reflects that all he really wanted to do …was to make jokes, to turn the world upside down and laugh at it and enliven this vale of tears with a little fantasy.” This would also pass muster as a fair summation of the effect of his comic novels. But, fantastical though they are, the fantasy is founded on a bedrock of precise observation and unflinching honesty. And 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 he presented to the world were deliberately provocative, not to say deliberately preposterous. But this honesty meant that nobody was more aware of the sham and the bogus than Waugh himself. And there is no better proof than his late self-portrait in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: he knew himself better than anyone. Gilbert Pinfold is the record of an actual attack of dementia that Waugh suffered but it is also a merciless depiction of the author in middle age. All criticisms of the man are pre-empted because the most devastating come from the man himself. And the same unblinking candour informs his dark, comic vision also. He saw the world and its denizens with absolute clarity and absolute unsentimentality — nowhere more so than in the great comedies where he displayed the nature of our short lives on this small planet with gleeful ruthlessness. This is what makes him, I think, an enduringly modern spirit (however paradoxical that adjective might seem when applied to Evelyn Waugh) and explains why the comic novels continue to beguile readers — provoking both laughter and serious reflection — and will continue to survive.

2003

Picture the scene. It is late at night, two or three in the morning and I am almost the last guest at a bibulous dinner party in north London. I need to get back home to Chelsea. I turn to the host: “I’d better call a cab,” I say. “Don’t worry,” he replies, “we have a local firm. Here in five minutes.” True enough, five minutes later there is a peremptory honking in the street. I make my farewells and go out to find my minicab. The car is not difficult to locate — double-parked and throbbing with muffled techno-pop. I slide into the back seat — apparently springless. Indeed the car, an indeterminate, currently unrecognizable model, appears to sit surprisingly low on its haunches, a real road-scraper.

The driver is smoking; the tearing, harsh voice of the dispatcher fizzles from the radio. “Where to?” the driver asks. The accent is foreign, foreign to London, anyway — the accents tend to come from far and wide, from Leeds, Aberdeen, Belgrade, Lagos, Kingston, Larnaca, Islamabad, Kiev. “Chelsea,” I reply. The set of the shoulders betokens no familiarity with this destination. “South-west London,” I add. “Embankment?” says the driver. “Get me to the Embankment and I can give you directions,” I say breezily, and settle back, noticing for the first time the curious smell — frowsty, farinaceous — here in the rear of this unclas-sifiable saloon, as if someone had cooked a spicy meal in the back of the car last week. Indeed, the material — the carpet — beneath my feet feels moist and tacky. I keep my hands in my lap and we pull away.

“POB,” the driver says into the handset of his radio. I know this means “passenger on board”—everybody knows this, so why the coy acronym? Then there is a fair bit of “Chelsea, yeah, Chelsea. Roger, Rog,” and the mike is rehung.

We drive crazily south, at high, reckless speed. I vaguely recognize the North Circular, Islington Green, then the Barbican, then the towers of Canary Wharf begin to loom closer. “Where are you going?” I ask, baffled. “Embankment,” comes the reply. “This is the wrong way,” I advise.

So, we turn and make our zig-zag way back to the West End, Parliament Square, Big Ben — now I know where I am and give confident instructions from the rear seat. The car is still being driven with adolescent disregard — exaggerated wheel-turn, heavy braking, muttered oaths. We pull up outside my house, a preposterous sum of money is demanded as the fare and a hostile altercation ensues. I see lights going on in my neighbours’ windows as the rhythmic thud of techno-pop rouses them from their beds. A compromise, but still-too-high figure is agreed (no tip) and no pen or paper is present either to furnish me with a receipt. I leave the car exhausted, frazzled, nervy, angry. I have just been mini-cabbed.

Admittedly, this scenario is an aggregate of several bad minicab journeys I’ve made — a nightmare amalgam of fear, irritation and noisome frustration — but aspects of this experience will ring true to almost everyone, I would claim. At some stage in their lives every Briton has been or will be minicabbed in a similar way. This, of course, is the downside of the minicab experience: there’s an upside too which we mustn’t forget (handy, cheapish, friendly, nearly always available). And “forget” is the key word, because the minicab, as we love and loathe it, will not be around for much longer: another quintessentially British phenomenon is about to be legislated — not out of existence — but into something safer, surer, more user-friendly. The minicab is going to become a pseudo-taxi.