contemporary landscape will be something less than authentic. To populate these structures, Waugh accordingly created a gallery of two-dimensional characters who roughly divide into two groups: the well-meaning traditionalists who live in parodies of a Gothic past and the willful moderns who enjoy a streamlined life in anonymous flats. The first inhabit a nostalgic dream of the past as it never was; the second refuse to be incommoded by loyalty to a tradition they neither respect nor understand.
Bed-sitting rooms and their transient residents become something of a motif in Waugh's fiction. Appointed with chromium-plated walls and natural sheepskin rugs, they express Waugh's vision of modern society: a curious blend of technological efficiency and primitive willfulness. When Ryder is told that Anchorage House is being razed so that a developer can put up a building with 'shops underneath and tworoomed flats above,' he describes the project as 'just another jungle moving in,' regaining its hold on formerly civilized precincts. But this efficiency housing has its apologists, especially among those who stand to profit from it such as Mrs. Beaver, the fashionable interior decorator in A Handful of Dust (1934). She argues that these flats meet 'a longfelt need.' After all, she explains, modern people only want a place 'to dress and telephone' between business and social engagements. In the twentieth century, architecture blithely discards any attempt to create a sense of home, much less to enshrine an earlier tradition.
In its extreme manifestation, modern architecture willfully strives to erase the past altogether, replacing ornate style with functional utility. Its logical goal is expressed by the avant-garde architect Otto Silenus in Waugh's first novel, Decline and Fall. 'The problem of architecture… is the problem of all art-the elimination of the human element from -869- the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men. I do not think it is possible for domestic architecture to be beautiful.' In the streamlined architecture of modernity, traditional human considerations become inconveniences, for, as Silenus gloomily concludes, 'All ill comes from man. Man is never beautiful; he is never happy except when he becomes the channel for the distribution of mechanical forces.'
Waugh, of course, was not the first of his generation to use architecture as the gauge of the bogus. His older contemporary Aldous Huxley employed a similar strategy in Antic Hay (1923), a work Waugh much admired and one that may have supplied him with the germ he needed to develop his own architectural motif.
In this narrative, an architect named Gumbril builds a scale model of an idealized London for no other purpose than to have it stand as a reproach to 250 years of unremitting urban mismanagement. He bases his work on the discarded plans of Christopher Wren, whose enlightened project for rebuilding the city after the Great Fire of London in 1666 was rejected. Gumbril's model graphically reveals the missed opportunity. ' Wren offered them open spaces and broad streets,' he explains, 'he offered them sunlight and air and cleanliness; he offered them beauty, order and grandeur; he offered to build for the imagination and the ambitious spirit of man… But they preferred to re-erect the old intricate squalor.' Yet he can't blame them, not when twentiethcentury London is making even worse mistakes, putting up 'a jumble of huge, hideous buildings.' Regent Street, 'the one street that was really like a symphony by Mozart-how busily and gleefully they're pulling it down… Order has turned into a disgusting chaos.' Making the same association Ryder does twenty-three years later in Brideshead, he continues, 'We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.' As Gumbril raves on about the spoliation of London, however, the narrator pulls back to reveal another view from his son's perspective. While his father gestures passionately over his model, his 'hair [blowing] wispily loose and [falling] into his eyes… his spectacles [flashing], as though they were living eyes,' Gumbril Junior sees him as 'a passionate and gesticulating silhouette' like 'one of those old shepherds who stand at the base of Piranesi's ruins demonstrating obscurely the prodigious grandeur and the abjection of the human race.' What we see is a man too blinded by his obsession to be -870- able to do anything practical about improving the conditions he so bitterly condemns. Gumbril Senior is a touching but absurd figure. Much like Waugh's decent, well-educated characters, he can identify the problem, but he is powerless to correct it. No match for the barbarous powers of disorder that surround him, he retreats to his studio to dream. His son, on the other hand, decides to engage the world on its own terms. His strategy, however, is patently ludicrous, literally so. A diffident, disillusioned, history teacher, he is convinced his educational efforts have been futile, if not misleading. ('I've been… encouraging boys of fifteen and sixteen to specialize in history… making them read bad writers' generalizations about subjects on which only our ignorance allows us to generalize.') He decides to quit his post so that he can make money with an invention of his own design: pneumatic trousers lined with inflatable rubber so that the artificially upholstered wearer need never suffer contact with the obdurate world around him. 'Civilization's substitute for steatopygism,' as he explains. 'A boon to those whose occupation is sedentary.' And, it might be added, a perfect solution for his overly intellectual class who would just as soon not be reminded of the physical basis of their daily lives. His ungainly invention couldn't be further from the elegance of his father's model, yet there is this resemblance: both men use their creations to keep uncomfortable realities at bay.
Huxley's characters typically contrive to place a bogus barrier between themselves and reality. In Point Counter Point (1928), Philip Quarles hides behind the architecture of his intellectualism, counseling those who allow their feelings to be shaped by poetry and novels that art shouldn't be taken too seriously. He is fond of pointing out how often the aesthetic view misleads people into emotional excesses and humiliating confusions. As if to counterpoint this counsel, the novel opens and closes with inconvenient pregnancies within his own family, the results of romance-inspired adulteries conducted by his naive brother-in-law and witless father. Despite all his intellectual armature, Philip has no answers for these real-life melodramas.
Huxley's most widely read work, Brave New World, portrays London some six hundred years on as a city that features architecture of astonishing design made possible by nontraditional building materials. One structure, 'a squat grey building' of 'only thirty-four stories,' is appointed in nickel and glass. An updated cathedral stands out against the night sky, 'flood-lighted, its three hundred and twenty metres of -871- white Carrara-surrogate gleam [ing] with a snowy incandescence.' Here, against an improbable cityscape, the bogus has become a prescribed way of life. In the narrative's weird utopia, dehumanization has been embraced as a species of social planning. In laboratories run on assembly-line methods, human fetuses are created in vitro so that they can be biologically engineered to the physical and mental specifications of their allotted places in society. Once the resulting children leave the production line, they are intensively conditioned to love the economically determined roles they will play throughout their existence. Even after they have been set to their adult tasks, they still remain close to their laboratory origins. So thoroughly uprooted from the ordinary terms of human existence, their bodies and minds must be artificially supplied with the chemicals and hormones that otherwise would be produced by the stimulus of normal experience. Since all births take place outside the womb, women must maintain their physical and mental health by periodically taking the hormones that accompany pregnancy. Insulated from the natural shocks of life, everyone is supplied with a 'Violent Passion Surrogate' to keep the adrenal glands functioning. These manufactured human beings have achieved the synthetic ideal. They live and die amid the geometric architecture of Huxley's satire, untouched by either original thought or personal emotion.
George Orwell also gauges society by its architecture. In what is arguably his best novel, Coming Up for Air (1939), his protagonist George Bowling, a forty-five-year-old insurance salesman, complains of the housing lower- middle-class peddlers like himself have to live in. These projects, made up of 'little stucco boxes,' are 'just a prison with the cells all in a row; a line of semi-detached torture-chambers where the poor little five-to-ten-pound-a- weekers quake and shiver,' each in fear of losing his 'brick dolls' house.' The irony, Bowling points out, is that the residents don't even own their homes. While many are under the illusion that they do, in fact these are lease-held units owned by a building society that nevertheless manages to charge the occupants twice their worth.
As if this weren't enough, Bowling continues, contemporary food is equally phony. Ersatz comestibles have become the standard since the Great War. Reading labels, he notes that one product is made with neutral fruit juices and wonders what kind of fruit grows on a neutral fruit tree. Stopping for lunch, he bites into -872- a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish!.. It gave me the feeling that I'd bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of. That's the way we're going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over, mockturtles grazing under the neutral fruit trees. But when you come down to brass tacks and get your teeth into something solid, a sausage for instance, that's what you get. Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth.
In an attempt to escape the bogus world of 1938, Bowling returns to Lower Binfield, the small farming village of his turn-of-the-century childhood only to discover that it too has been infected with the streamlining disease. The food in the shops is made with margarine, the beer with chemicals. Worse, there's an upscale housing development
