William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

“Weight,” as Kundera defines it, is to do with love, compassion and a true sense of the absurd dictates of chance and contingency. “Lightness” is to do with sex, frivolity and irresponsibility. In the novel Kundera debates and counterposes the reasons for and the consequences of choosing one or the other. The dialectic is urbanely, wittily and cleverly orchestrated. One senses too — and Kundera encourages us to think so — that the conflict is a highly individual one (“The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities”) born out of his own personality and his experience at the hands of the malign and bizarre forces of recent European history.

In a significant sense, then, The Unbearable Lightness of Being can be described as an intensely moral book which, for all its superficial postmodernist totems (paraded fictiveness, blatant authorial intervention, disdain of basic narrative convention), would satisfy the most stringent and traditional imperatives of Leavisite “relevance” and “value.” For, in the novel, Kundera is really attempting to answer the key questions of how we should live our lives, given the sordid, perplexed and fraught nature of the human condition, and of the place of Love in a world seemingly compromised by corruption, self-delusion and evil.

His answer is dramatized — most movingly — in the death from cancer of Tomas and Tereza’s dog Karenin (the name is no accident). The animal’s slow, puzzled, wracked demise becomes a focus for all those traditional verities — compassion, understanding, disinterested love — so opposed to “lightness” and all it stands for. On the penultimate page of the novel Tereza apologizes for the way she has literally and metaphorically brought him down. “Haven’t you noticed I’ve been happy here?” Tomas says.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being is of course a far more complex notion than this review can convey. It’s not, for example, to be confused with earnestness or commitment, and has nothing to do with political ideology (an elaborate disquisition on the phenomenon of “kitsch” denies weight to the passionate idealists of both East and West, Left and Right). It seems to be, to simplify once again, a steadfastly ironic facing up to all the sadness of the human condition, coupled with an awareness of the value of the modest and fleeting moments of happiness it can also provide (Tomas’s declaration occurs on the last night of his and Tereza’s life). The modish succés fou of this book does it a huge disservice: this is a clever, thoughtful, intellectually stimulating, occasionally flawed novel, but its central concerns are perennially valuable and humane.

1984

Evelyn Waugh was not fond of Labels, his fourth published book. In an interview given later in his life he referred to it dismissively as “a collection of essays bundled together.” In 1946, when he edited all his travel writing for the compilation When the Going Was Good only fifty of Labels’ 200 pages were included. Indeed, superficially, there does not appear much to recommend the book. An account of a cruise in the Mediterranean is hardly exotic. A few weeks on a luxury liner would not qualify one as an intrepid traveller. Also, the assignment was undertaken solely for money (although I realize that this does not imply, a priori, that the work will be bad) and was written up at speed over a period of two months in early 1930. And yet, in my opinion, this, the first of Waugh’s many travel books, is his best and most fascinating, and, for reasons which we will discover, it is a highly significant document with an important bearing on the development of Waugh’s oeuvre and is a vital clue as to why Waugh’s personality took the abrasive, complex and troubled course it did.

In 1929, when the trip that was to provide the raw material for Labels was undertaken, Waugh was twenty-six years old. He had just published his first novel, Decline and Fall, to tremendous critical and popular acclaim. He was a “fashionable” young writer, a self-appointed spokesman for Modern Youth and made regular appearances in the gossip columns. Life had finally taken a dramatic turn for the better. For, after the pleasant distractions and rowdy hedonism of Oxford, Waugh’s fortunes had reached a low ebb. He attempted vainly to become an artist and illustrator but lack of money drove him to badly paid jobs in remote preparatory schools. While his Oxford contemporaries were establishing reputations for themselves Waugh was miserably unhappy. He wanted to be an artist, he wanted to move easily in English high society, he wanted to be wealthy and he wanted to be in love. In the disappointing years following his university career it looked very unlikely that he would ever achieve any of these ambitions. But then the publication of Decline and Fall (1928) changed everything. He was now a novelist (albeit a reluctant one), celebrated, wined and dined, had made some money and there was now the prospect of making more, and he was married. Waugh had married (just prior to the publication of Decline and Fall) a pretty girl called Evelyn Gardner. They were known to their friends as “he-Evelyn” and “she-Evelyn.” Evelyn Gardner was “modern” (her blonde hair was cut in a short bob), wanted to write herself, and was well bred — she was the daughter of Lord Burghclere. Everything seemed to be perfect. They were both very happy and they lived in a small flat in London in Canonbury Square.

In the winter of 1928 “she-Evelyn” fell ill with a bad attack of German measles. To help her convalesce and to allow Waugh to write a travel book (while he gathered material for his next novel) a Mediterranean cruise was planned. Waugh’s agent managed to negotiate the Waughs’ free passage on the MY Stella Polaris in return for favourable mentions of the ship in Labels. In the gossip column of the Daily Sketch their departure was reported thus: the Waughs

were about to spend the proceeds of Decline and Fall in a tour of Southeastern Europe and the Levant… in the most luxurious boat in the whole Mediterranean… Mr Waugh is going to write a travel diary about the trip… But there is more to come: “I am really going to concentrate on drawing during the voyage … I hope I can bring back enough sketches to hold an exhibition in June, and, if it is successful, abandon writing for painting.”

We can see how the idea of earning his living from the pen was still essentially uncongenial to Waugh.

But the voyage was not a success. The couple caught a train to Monte Carlo, where they were to board the Stella Polaris, but on the journey south she-Evelyn fell ill once more with a high fever. She was ill throughout the first portion of the cruise — Naples, Haifa, Port Said — with what was later diagnosed as pneumonia. She-Evelyn was moved to hospital in Port Said and the Stella Polaris sailed on without the Waughs. When she-Evelyn was feeling better they moved to a large hotel near Cairo. For the first time the two of them actually began to feel they were on holiday.

From Egypt they sailed to Malta where they managed to rejoin the Stella Polaris for the rest of her voyage — Crete, Constantinople, Venice, Ragusa and Barcelona were among the places they visited. The enforced delay in Port Said and Cairo and the medical bills that ensued there meant that Waugh had spent far more than he had planned on the cruise. On the way home to England he wrote as many newspaper articles as he reasonably could in an attempt to defray his expenses.

The trip had been something of a disaster, but none of this appears in Labels. The itinerary is the same but the circumstances of the voyage are altered beyond recognition — to the extent that a pronounced fictional element enters the narrative. The single, simple reason for this is that shortly after their return to London the Waughs’ marriage collapsed irretrievably.