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EVELYN WAUGH 5.

Readings from VILE BODIES and HELENA - .

Early in his career Evelyn Waugh announced that he was taking up the study of “carpentry and of fashionable society.” In his 1920 Oxford days, he was regarded by at least one of his admirers (Harold Acton, to whom is dedicated Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall) as a “prancing faun, thinly disguised by conventional apparel. ” And in the early aovels, especially Vile Bodies, Waugh merged his proclaimed interests as he deftly nailed down the manners, mores, and adiaphorous doings in Mayfair. The career of the writer perhaps underwent no stranger de- velopments than those which befall all men; but when the novelist became a Catholic in 1930, a number of his readers professed (perhaps too conveniently) to find him changed. And, like it or not, he is doomed in this age of categories to being regarded as a Catholic Novelist.

~ When he visited America i in 1946, Waugh announced that ‘iis future books would have two aims: “‘a preoccupation with style and the 2..tempt

~«o represent man more fully, which, to me, means only one “ung, man in his relation to God.” The first success following this pronuaciamento

was The Loved One, one of his best known satires. Four yea » after that particular American tour, he published Helena, a novel which perhaps

best fulfills his criteria — though at the time of Helena he disavowed

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any desire to be the bearer of messages: “Words should be aa in ‘ense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker. If there isn’t that pleasure for a writer maybe he ought to be a philosopher.” Helena is a personal favorite of its author, and is his sericus attempt to write historical fiction, a genre he has generally avoided ‘n his concern with his own milieu and the cavorting of his conten poraries. Helena succeeded so well, he insisted to Harvey Breit, it shoul) be considercd a (or his) masterpiece: “It’s never been done before. fvear. using vo it is E. M. Forster’s sketches of Alexandria.”

When Waugh was asked to make this recording he was told, thz

could select any material he liked: the reading was to be his presen ae ticn of himself as he would like to be heard. As the author teligson’ this album, fragments of a work of art can scarcely suggest the wi ole. He

has contented himself, therefore, with giving momentary glances at the worlds of 1930 London and of Fourth Century Rome as he himself saw them at the beginning and in the middle of his career, respectively. Of the virtues in undertaking such a recording he is professedly dubious.

After all, had not the first chapter of his autobiographical The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold discussed such enterprises with alarm? “Mr. Pinfold

received an invitation from the B.B.C. to record an ‘interview.’ In the

Recorded April 19, 1960, London.

Inc. Used by permission.

previous twenty years there had been many such proposals and ': always refused them. This time the fee was more liberal and the _or tions softer. . In an idle moment Mr. Pinfold agreed and regretted it.”

Unfortunately our recording session could not be held in th as occurred in The Ordeal of G.P., and Mr. W: agh was comp come up to London. That same April he mad? tae album he an in the Daily Mail: “I go to London on'y to get my hair cut publishers: .Yobody except stock-brokers ‘lives the. - > any more. a ‘squalid cosmopolitan city, no longer F nglish fuil of foreign with all the decerit buildings torn down.” : /

It is not only the architectural changes whieh have di author and immured him in the country. Ii is the London liter; where the dominant writers are ones for whom he has scan whose work he consid: + an affront. Of England's Angry Yo he complains, * They’ ve all been reared in homes where FE. the native tongue.’ > He has small sympathy for even the most American stylists, and_of one of our more successfully languorous figures he snorts, “Vet boy can’t write for toffee.” (He seemed referring especially to grammar and syntax; as far as Wai cerned, a violation of structure is the revelation of a crack tha an entire foundation needs repair or demolition.) Like his Gilb fold, he was not going to announce readily whom he admired: ‘ all dead.” But he did like Max Beerbohm, and he does enj 0 Wodehouse.

All of these dicta must be regarded circumspectly. As a critic wre September 16, 1960 in the London Times Literary Supplement: ‘ Evelyn Waugh is among the most deceptive of writers; in an age of * seli-exhibition: he is-neither ,wh@t the public takes nor what he gi himself out to pee? He may, ¢ endeavor to pass himself off as a snob, bu on the April afternoon’ in St John’s Wood when he cut this album, he - seemed rather shy and sensitive, what Dr. Johnson would have called a clubbable man. No wonder that an intimate could see him as a faun; perhaps that remains a truer recollection than to think of him as a country squire’.on the Somerset-Gloucestershire border, coming to London for haircuts. Either way, this album glimpses facets i in a fascin- ating man and. the worlts that he has created and chronicled.

—LawrENCE D. STEWART