The Private Language of Evelyn Waugh

Abstract

T H E P R I V A T E L A N G U A G E OF E V E L Y N W A U G H JEFFREY M. HEATH University of Toronto ennis Barlow, hero of The Loved One, returns one evening to find his host strung to the rafters. "To Dennis it was the kind of thing to be expected in the world he knew."1 A combination of "Shadowland" and "Slumberland," the world Dennis knows is the final stage in Waugh's historical formula of decline through imitation: "the world of wild aberration without theological significance."2 Much has been written about the "delightful baroque circus tent"3 of Waugh's private world, often, it might be added, on the quite mistaken assumption that it bears no relation to the real world. Much has been said about Waugh's bizarre characters, his macabre plots, and his narrative dexterity. Less flatteringly, much has been said about his "ideas." But surpris­ ingly little attention has been paid to what is surely the most remarkable quality of Waugh's private world: its private language. Scattered published comments make it plain that Waugh regarded himself as a stylist, not as a thinker. He spoke often of his abiding interest in the English language, praised it as "the most lavish and delicate which mankind has ever known," and numbered himself among the "thin line of devotees who made its refinement and adornment their life's work."4 Like his persona, Gilbert Pin­ fold, Waugh "stood quite high" in "a generation notable for elegance and variety of contrivance" (The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, p 1). Those who have examined Waugh's technique usually report that Waugh endorses and emu­ lates Augustan lucidity, and that he is "objective." Thus Edmund Wilson's comparison of Waugh's early novels with those of Fitzgerald and Hemingway: "They are not so poetic; they are perhaps less intense; they belong to a more classical tradition.''5 R.M. Davis places Waugh in the Fielding tradition of elegant language, complex plots, and external behaviour.6 These estimates are in the main accurate; certainly they reflect the current view of Waugh as a diligent craftsman, and anyone familiar with Waugh's formal statements on fiction could produce a sheaf of quotations to confirm that view. There is, however, a private aspect of Waugh's work to which the tag of elegant technician, with its connotations of ready public accessibility, fails to do justice. It is this private aspect, virtually ignored, which emerges when Waugh's writing is considered not simply as fiction but as persuasion. While it English Stud ies in Ca n ad a, ii , 3 , Fall 1976 33« English Studies in Canada is true, as Davis has said, that Waugh "has explicitly condemned attempts to make literature into propaganda," Waugh's beliefs nevertheless pass over into his rhetoric so completely that the result is "entertainment" on one level and something more subliminal than propaganda on another. Peter Green has noticed that Waugh "would appeal to what we are learning to call the Hidden Persuaders."7 And in a thoughtful essay on Waugh's prose style George Greene has commented on "its notable range of epithet, its richness of implication": "Waugh is constantly prodding at the frontier of our verbal memories as well as our sensibility ... Few authors seem less interested in persuasion in the dogma­ tic, ideological sense of that term."8 Neither a "thinker" nor a dogmatist, Waugh is engaged in the timehonoured pursuit of producing effects. Like Eliot's burglar-poet who supplies red meat to distract the housedog, Waugh achieves his most telling effects through cadences and allusions "embedded" in a deceptively simple prose. In Waugh's work the "plain style" carries a surprising amount of private jargon, so elusive that the uninitiated reader might well question its presence. Present it is, however, as Waugh has many times implied. "Much can be done by innuendo," he declared in a 1959 review of The Dictionary of National Biography.9In a 1932 review he wrote, "Humour, particularly of the allusive kind which appeals to a common standard of culture, is present in everything that...