In Waugh's view, the Modern Age has crazily destroyed and cannibalized what he finds supremely valuable - veneration for tradition and hierarchy the aristocratic way of life the onetime supremacy of the Catholic Church throughout Western society. They are merely outré symbols of the theme, often explicitly stated, which underlies all of Waugh's work - that our twentieth-century civilization is a decaying corpse. The Loved One focuses with a bland and relentless fascination on every detail in the preparation of cadavers for burial by a de luxe establishment in SouthernĬrazy accidents cannibalism cadavers. The hero of Black Mischief, after feasting with savages on a delicious pot-au-feu, learns that he has just eaten his recent mistress, Prudence, daughter of the British Minister. Agatha Runcible - one of the Bright Young People in Vile Bodies - tipsily joins a motor race, has a crackup, and, after a cocktail party in her sick room, dies. Consider a few of the episodes from which (taken in their proper context) Waugh has succeeded in distilling the choicest entertainment. There are few contemporary writers of the first rank whose imagination runs to such appalling and macabre inventions as Waugh's does and there is none who carries audacity to such lengths in using the atrocious as the material of farce. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour." On the planet where Waugh's comic novels have their being, Oxford and Mayfair are as barbarous in their way as darkest Azania. An Oxford porter says to an undergraduate who has just been expelled: "I expect you'll be becoming a school master, sir. A primitive ruler, eager to be modern, is induced by a wily contractor to purchase boots for his barefoot army: the savages happily heat up their cookpots and devour the boots. "Pure Evelyn Waugh." The expression evokes a riotously anarchic cosmos, in which only the outrageous can happen, and - when it does happen is outrageously diverting in which people reason and behave with awesome inconsequence and lunatic logic. The adjective "Waughsian" is too much of a tongue twister to have passed into our vocabulary, but a substitute phrase has - "It's pure Evelyn Waugh." He is, par excellence, an example of the artist who has created a world peculiarly his own. WHEN blurb writers are caroling the praises of some newly emerged maestro of sophisticated farce, they can seldom resist the temptation of comparing him to "the early Evelyn Waugh." Despite the fact that Brideshead Revisited - which introduces the "later" or "serious" Evelyn Waugh - has sold many more copies in the United States than all of Waugh's other books put together, his name, at least among the literary - is still most apt to evoke a singular brand of comic genius.
Evelyn Waugh: The Best and The Worst - 10.54
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