Intellect, Appetite, and Example in the Novels of Evelyn Waugh

Abstract

I N T E L L E C T , A P P E T I T E , A N D E X A M P L E I N T H E N O V E L S O F E V E L Y N W A U G H JEFFREY HEATH University of T oronto I n the impudently funny opening pages of Waugh’s Decline and Fall, two Oxford dons listen apprehensively to sounds of drunken revelry as they cower behind a darkened window. No other figures of authority are present — most are enjoying bacchanalias of their own — and rather than suppress­ ing the disorder they behold, Sniggs and Postlethwaite actively encourage it: “Oh, please God, make them attack the Chapel,” Sniggs prays, thinking of the Founder’s port he’ll savour after the fines have reached £50. The source of the uproar is the banquet of the aristocratic “Bollinger Club,” famous for their crudity and barbarism. Before their “lovely evening” is over, they have smashed a grand piano and have destroyed exquisite cigars, china, a Matisse, and the manuscript of a prize poem. What, the reader wonders, has induced the leaders of society to behave in such an uncivilized manner? Moreover, what strange force has drawn dim and unoffending Paul Pennyfeather into their orbit, to be “debugged” and expelled for “indecent behaviour” ? The reader with a taste for justice may well complain that Paul does not deserve his fate; surely, it may be argued, he has nothing in common with the brutes who tear him loose from his haven and send him forth into a cold world populated by savages like Fagan, Philbrick, and Margot Beste-Chetwynde. Paul Pennyfeather is a reasonable and prudent young man: he lives within his allowance, smoking only three ounces of mild tobacco a week and abstemiously drinking only a pint and a half of beer a day. His friends are mild-mannered and “enlightened,” and he supplements his theological studies by taking an interest in plebiscites and the League of Nations Union. By no means a drunkard himself, he has once read a daringly theoretical paper on intoxication to the Thomas More Society. No one seems less likely to be mistaken for a member of the Bollinger Club and sent down for licentious behaviour. Yet Waugh is a relentlessly logical writer, and if we look closely at Paul’s expulsion, we may find justification for it; indeed, we may find that it is the archetypal event which informs all of Waugh’s fiction.1 E n g lish Studies in C anada, xi, i, March 1985 I should like to suggest that, contrary to appearances, Paul meets the Bollinger and is expelled from his “lush place” at Scone College not despite his reasonableness but because of it — and because of the irresponsible teachers who have encouraged his reason at the expense of his spiritual development. Advocates of rationality and intellect may find such an asser­ tion improbable, but Waugh, as we shall see, was no friend of the unguided reason. It was his view, formed by unhappy experiences of his own, that human reason was no match for savagery and that it could actually lead to savagery: hence, for example, the “chance” meeting of prudent Paul Pennyfeather and the barbaric Lumsden of Strathdrummond. Despite its ostensibly light-hearted tone, Decline and Fall constitutes a serious attack on two of Waugh’s perennial targets: the unaided reason and the bad mentors who have wrong-headedly fostered it. An examination of Waugh’s autobiography reveals a bitter arraignment of bad teaching.2 Waugh’s first bad teacher was his father, Arthur Waugh, whom Evelyn remembered primarily for his absence, but also for his “absurd” religious beliefs and late-Victorian literary tastes. The professional teachers who later moulded Waugh’s character were moved by intellect or by appetite, but seldom by both in equal measure. At Heath Mount School, the Headmaster, Mr. Granville Grenfell, “impressed on us the idea of rational argument” (83). Other instructors routinely emerged from and faded back into the “heterogeneous and undefinable underworld” of public school teaching (84). They were sometimes tyrannous and lecherous, some­ times obsequious, but almost...