William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

This process had been accelerated by the now pressing financial reasons for Waugh to write his second novel (which was to be Vile Bodies). In order for him to do this quickly he had to be alone and away from the social distractions of London. Waugh went to stay in a pub near Oxford — the Abingdon Arms in the village of Beckley — and immediately set to work on his novel. She-Evelyn remained in London, now fully recovered and determined to enjoy the social round after the enervating problems of her two-month cruise.

This is not the place to analyse the reasons for the breakdown of Evelyn Waugh’s marriage. To put it simply, she-Evelyn met another man with whom she fell in love. She told Waugh this and he abandoned his novel and returned home in an attempt to win her back. She-Evelyn promised never to see her lover again but their reunion proved to be an unhappy time together. After two miserable weeks they decided to get divorced.

Waugh was devastated by the failure of his marriage and by what he saw as his public humiliation. I do not believe that it is an overstatement to say that his divorce and his wife’s betrayal affected him for the rest of his life. It brought about a profound change in the way he saw the world and in the way he presented himself to others. It was a major reason for him embracing the Catholic faith a few years later and its reverberations can be detected in almost all his subsequent fiction.

In the months following the separation Waugh wrote Vile Bodies. Much of that novel’s remorseless clear-eyed cynicism is a product of Waugh’s bitter and misanthropic mental state at the time.

Labels, which he had to begin almost immediately after, must have seemed like the most thankless of tasks: to relive in prose the two difficult months preceding his wife’s betrayal. Waugh set about it with professional purpose. The book is based on detailed diaries (which he later destroyed) which he had kept throughout the trip, but she-Evelyn is expunged from the record. Waugh presents himself as a bachelor, travelling alone, a reserved and supercilious presence observing his fellow voyagers with a neutral, objective gaze. Amongst his travelling companions is a young couple, Geoffrey and Juliet, who are on their honeymoon:

a rather sweet-looking young English couple — presumably, from the endearments of their conversation and marked solicitude for each other’s comfort, on their honeymoon, or at any rate recently married. The young man was small and pleasantly dressed and wore a slight curly moustache; he was reading a particularly good detective story with apparent intelligence. His wife was huddled in a fur coat in the corner, clearly far from well.

Geoffrey and Juliet: he-Evelyn and she-Evelyn.

In this curious, schizoid way Waugh contemplates himself and his ex-wife. Indirectly, from time to time we learn of Geoffrey and Juliet’s difficult voyage, of Juliet’s illness and hospitalization, of Geoffrey’s deep concern and worry. From time to time, too, Geoffrey and Waugh go out together and visit the sights of Port Said. It is not putting too fine a point on it, I think, to see in Labels Waugh bidding farewell to his former self. An altogether tougher, more self-sufficient and, it has to be said, unpleasant persona emerged.

“The young man was small and pleasantly dressed and wore a slight curly moustache.” Waugh was blond and only five foot five inches tall. He was a small, fair, boisterous young man. “Faunlike” and “childlike” are adjectives contemporaries used to describe him in the Twenties. It is worth recalling this — and his diminutive size — especially in the face of the image of Waugh that has survived (in Britain at least) after his death. Waugh is remembered as an aggressive man, a snob and of reactionary tastes and political opinions. Fat and choleric, playing out a role — very deliberately — of a testy colonel or outraged Tory squire; dressed in loud-check tweeds and brandishing an ear-trumpet, the image of the elder Waugh is calculated to give offence. It was an ideal mask to hide behind. The great value of Labels, once one knows its history, is that we can see the first steps in the construction of that mask which, with various adornments, was to serve him well throughout the rest of his life. Only in his fiction was it allowed to drop; only there can we see, to employ T. S. Eliot’s dichotomy, the “man who suffers” behind the “mind which creates.” And this honesty is what redeems Waugh the artist in the end, no matter how repugnant we find the man he forced himself to be.

This too explains much about Labels. The book is by a man at his most vulnerable, writing about a period in his recent history which must have been, thanks to the cruel ironies of hindsight, almost unbearably painful. This must go a long way to explain the hauteur in the tone of voice, the mandarin pomposities that surface occasionally in the style and the disdain and xenophobia that are apparent in the content.

These were not new attitudes. Even as a schoolboy Waugh understood how to be superior. But in Labels we see the fashioning of a creed, and aesthetic, that was to see Waugh through until his death. I do not think that anybody reading the book “blind,” as it were, would guess its author’s age to be twenty-seven. The voice has the confidence of a man almost twice that age; of a man unlikely to be persuaded that there are other points of view with equal validity.

In this sense it is also a very English book, and manifests a very English sense of its own essential superiority and worth in comparison to all the other races of the world. It is an Englishman who contemplates other cultures and civilizations armed with

a vague knowledge of History, Literature and Art, an amateurish interest in architecture and costume, of social, religious, and political institutions, of drama, of the biographies of the chief characters of each century, of a few anecdotes and jokes, scraps of diaries and correspondence and family history … fused together … so that the cultured Englishman has a sense of the past, in a continuous series of clear and pretty tableaux vivants.

As it happens this is still a pretty good definition of the “cultured Englishman,” and it represents the point of view of the sort of man Waugh aspired to be. But such a man would be unlikely to admire Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. And here again we come to the complexity and contradiction that underlie all of Waugh’s work. He was a deeply sensitive man who behaved like a boor; an aesthete with precise refined tastes who dressed like a bookmaker … a long list of such antitheses can be compiled. And it is in these conflicting impulses that we find, I believe, the key to the many and varied pleasures his books provide, and Labels is no exception. We experience a frisson of outrage at some racial slight, recoil at opinions of absurdly dogmatic cast and yet at the same time are challenged and intrigued by observations and judgements of genuine originality and acuity. In the end Waugh’s brilliance — one might say his particular genius — is to defeat all easy categorizations. For, whatever Labels’ fascinating autobiographical pertinence, it is also a tremendously fresh, funny and stimulating book. But there is no denying that a knowledge of the circumstances in which it was written adds considerably to its overall impact. It is ultimately a sad book; it is the fruit of sad and chastening experience, and no one acquainted with Waugh’s own personal grief, and understanding the poignancy of his hurt and disillusion, can dismiss the book’s final lines as merely the product of a precocious or affected sagacity:

Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.