If Waugh often behaved like a curmudgeon, it was because he seems to have wanted to hide how much he was attracted to modernity, hide it, perhaps, even from himself. This may be why the element of disguise plays such an enormous role in his fiction. Characters are forever putting on and taking off new identities as readily as they do the false beards that seem to proliferate through his early works. So pervasive is disguise that some characters give up all effort to distinguish one person from another. In Vile Bodies the celebrated hotelkeeper, Lottie Crump, solves the problem of personal identification by reducing everyone to nameless anonymity. Even the most illustrious of title and fortune are reduced to the common denominator of 'Mr. What-d'you-call-him' and 'Lord Thingummy.' In a dehumanized world, there's not much to be gained by distinguishing between one person and the next. As long as they pay their bills, they're all the same.
For his own personal disguise, Waugh assumed the role of country squire disgusted with all developments later than 1910, not to mention quite a few before. Writing of himself in the third person in his autobiographical novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), he announced that his 'strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz-everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime.' His manner of living gave color to these words. At thirtyfour, he made a display of turning his back on his age and joining the squirearchy of the West Country. In later life, he used his loss of hearing to dramatize his distance from all things modern. He went about with an oversized Victorian ear trumpet, flourishing it this way and that to demonstrate visually his inability to hear what the contemporary world had to say to him. Tilting the trumpet toward an after- dinner -877- speaker one evening, he made a show of initial interest. But before the talk was a few minutes old, he began to unstrap the contraption from his head, disassembling it and placing the pieces on the table next to his plate. His deliberately conspicuous performance had the desired effect. The speaker was so thoroughly discomfited he sat down before half his allotted time was up.
But, for all his advertised disgust with contemporary developments, Waugh kept remarkably informed about them. Throughout his writing career we find him addressing modern art, functional architecture, photography, and film- 'everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime.' At fourteen he wrote an essay defending cubism against the 'deliberate misunderstanding of a prejudiced public.' At Oxford he rode motorcycles, flew with a stunt pilot, co-starred with Elsa Lanchester in a film of his own devising. In 1929, we find him commuting to Paris by plane. During the war, he volunteered for commando service, reporting later that his parachute training was wonderfully exhilarating. For all his country-squire affectations, Waugh was very much a man of his time.
Waugh has been viewed by some as a sharper-tongued P. G. Wodehouse, a more substantial Ronald Firbank, or, to borrow Sean O'Faolain's formula, 'a purely brainless genius, with a gift for satire.' He has been written off as a minor novelist who created his own idiosyncratic world redolent of Edwardian nostalgia. Recent criticism, however, has uncovered another Waugh, one who in fact had more in common with modernists such as Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot. Like them, he was keenly interested in the peculiarities of life in our century. While he was never comfortable in his age, it is impossible to imagine him in any other. This is nowhere more apparent than in his approach to his art.
Although Waugh seems to have encouraged the notion that he was a spontaneous writer working with nonchalant ease, he in fact shared with his modernist contemporaries a deliberate and painstaking commitment to his craft. Waugh's official biographer, Christopher Sykes, reports that he was proud of his hands, which were disproportionately large for a man of his frame. He regarded them as craftsman's hands, adding that like a craftsman he liked to tinker with his work. In The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, he places himself among 'the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century… notable for elegance and -878- variety of contrivance.' His work, early and late, supports these selfassessments.
Waugh began his career with all the deliberation one would expect from a self-conscious artist. His early essays reveal a writer thoroughly aware of his forerunners, especially the modernists of the previous generation. He put himself to school to his older contemporaries. Doing so, he developed a prose style and narrative strategy of extraordinary energy and poise.
Waugh didn't turn to the better-known modernists, however. He didn't care for Virginia Woolf's novels, and while he admired James Joyce's early work, he was put off by what he considered the exorbitant subjectivity of his later fiction. (He claimed that reading Ulysses one could detect the master modernist going mad sentence by sentence.) Waugh decided that most modernist fiction was marred by self-indulgence. He found its inwardness suffocatingly irrelevant to his concerns. So instead of Woolf or Joyce, he claimed the decidedly minor satirist Ronald Firbank and the cranky modernist Wyndham Lewis as his literary mentors.
In a 1929 essay, Waugh argued that Firbank had 'solved the problem which most vexes the novelist of the present time.' This problem was how to reproduce the modernist sense of social and personal dissolution without capitulating to it. Waugh admired Firbank's wit, calling it 'structural.' Its speed and objectivity reminded him of cinematic editing. 'His compositions are built up, intricately and with a balanced alternation of the wildest extravagance and the most austere economy, with conversational nuances. They may be compared to cinema films in which the relation of caption and photograph is directly reversed; occasionally a brief, visual image flashes out to illumine and explain the flickering succession of spoken words.' Firbank gave Waugh the tactics he needed to display a crazed world without succumbing to its chaos: accelerated cinematic editing delivered deadpan by a detached narrator. It was a style that enabled him to impart a surreal quality to his satire while remaining unflappably aloof from the fray it reported. In Decline and Fall (1928), his narrator coolly introduces Oxford's Bollinger Club, an organization that draws its members from a rich vein of European lunacy. In a bemused tone, he reports of their 'pouring into Oxford' for their irregularly held annual dinner:
Epileptic royalty from their villas of exile; uncouth peers from crumbling country seats; smooth young men of uncertain tastes from embassies and legations; illiterate lairds from wet granite hovels in the Highlands; ambitious young bar-879- risters and Conservative candidates torn from the London season and the indelicate advances of debutantes; all that was most sonorous of name and title were there for the beano.
The disparity between lineage and language in this catalog of decadence speaks for itself. There cannot be many other sentences that join «sonorous» with 'beano.' But then Waugh adds the patented Firbank touch. At the last Bollinger dinner, his narrator reports with undisguised relish, 'a fox had been brought in in a cage and stoned to death with champagne bottles. What an evening that had been!' What kind of evening we're never told. But there is no need for an explanation. The flickering image says quite enough about this parody of upper-class habits.
If Firbank suggested the structure and attitude, Wyndham Lewis supplied the rationale. In 1930 Waugh reviewed Lewis's Satire and Fiction, reporting that it was a work 'no novelist and very few intelligent novel readers can afford to neglect.' He was especially attracted to Lewis's discussion of 'the method of the external approach… the wisdom of the eye.' Lewis urged novelists to turn away from the interior psychologizing on which modernists such as Woolf and Joyce had embarked and to focus instead on the outward appearances. He argued that the pursuit of truth in the subjective was not only selfindulgent but, worse, uninteresting. To exalt the interior feelings above an intellectual engagement with history was to betray one's artistic duty. To suppose that truth lay in 'the dark places of psychology,' as Woolf had put it, was to be either criminally self-indulgent or culpably misled.
For Lewis the exploration of the subconscious did not uncover what was distinctive about a person. Instead, it revealed the undifferentiated substratum of emotions and impulses common to all. Fiction, he argued, should concern itself with how particular individuals succeed or fail to shape this universal material into a distinctive personality, revealed in deeds and appearances. Most people, he believed, rarely did much with it at all. The general run of humanity, he assumed, fall into predictably conventional patterns. As creatures of their time, they deserve nothing more or less than the satirist's unsparing gaze. To gain the effect he wanted, Lewis reversed Henri Bergson's formula for humor. Bergson had argued that humor derives from describing human beings as though they were mechanisms. In Lewis's novels, humor aris-880- es when the puppet mechanisms that stand for his characters try to behave as though they were human.
Lewis's presence can be felt in much of Waugh's early fiction. In Decline and Fall, Paul Pennyfeather is Waugh's first puppet character, a young man with as much substance as his name implies. As the narrator mockingly reports, he is no more than a narrative convenience. He 'would never had made a hero, and the only interest about him arises from the unusual series of events of which his shadow was witness.' He may have been a 'solid figure of an intelligent, well-educated, well-conducted young man' in another age, but not in this unseemly one. Paul's classical Oxford education and civilized manners are no match for the barbarous twentieth century. With a Firbankian wink, the narrator explains that 'the whole of this book is really an account of the mysterious disappearance of Paul Pennyfeather, so readers must not complain if the shadow which took his name does not amply fill the important part of hero for which he was originally cast.' Paul begins a line of hapless protagonists to
