Books: Mid-Victorian in Exile

A LITTLE LEARNING by Evelyn Waugh. 34 pages. Little, Brown. $5. I should like to bury something previous in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back nd dig it up and remember.

-Lord Sebastian Flyte, in Brideshead Revisited >Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh is a Tivian with a lifelong and unswerving Hatred of the 20th century’s industrialized, democratized ways. From his first irrespressibly comic, murderously sar-comic novels (Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies), most of Waugh’s books have vad as their real subject the loss of a golden age. Looking back, the Oxford Vlnd Mayfair targets Waugh satirized in Viene ’20s and ’30s have largely vanished, Baking with them half the early novels’ Viumor but leaving the rage intact. After World War II he suddenly turned eariest: Brideshead Revisited is a frankly logic lament for the passing of a golden youth and innocence. Most read mourned the change.

Now 61, Waugh has decided that his -own time has come to dig up the past and remember. In this reticent, ironic, Quietly elegant first volume of autobiography (he plans two more), Waugh takes his life through school and Oxford, ending on the eve of his first littrary success. He insists that from early Childhood he sensed “another age which 1 instinctively, even then, recognized as Superior to my own.” This nostalgia for “the Mid-Victorian ethos” later came to be a fixed theme of Waugh’s books-and of his religion, his Tory politics, his testy and forceful prejudices.

Glow of Happiness. Typically, Waugh “follows the old fashion” of autobiography and begins not with himself but his ancestors. With warmth, wit and antiquarian zeal he traces them through four generations of the solid, comfortably moneyed professional class that saw the flowering of the British Empire. Waugh himself was born near London in 1903, given the name Evelyn “from a whim of my mother’s. I have never liked the name.” He borrows an anecdote from much later in life to illustrate why: “Once during the Italian-Abyssinian war I went to a military post many miles from any white woman, preceded by a signal apprising them of’ the arrival of ‘Evelyn Waugh, English writer.’ The entire small corps of officers, shaven and polished, turned out to greet me each bearing a bouquet.” His childhood in Edwardian England he remembers as idyllic, “an even glow of pure happiness.” His memories of boyhood are vividly visual, from his nursery wallpaper (a pattern of medieval figures) to the beauties of the countryside and villages, which were rapidly being destroyed by urbanization in “the grim cyclorama of spoliation which surrounded all English experience in this century.” He remembers loving the old-fashioned lighting, he even claims he loved the antique plumbing.

Violence &; Hardships. Waugh’s one-chapter portrait of his father is a charming and loving memorial. Arthur Waugh was plump, modest and kind, a publisher and man of letters in the old-fashioned sense who “genuinely liked books-quite a rare taste today.” He was also unceasingly histrionic. “In greeting visitors he was Mr. Hardcastle; in deploring the ingratitude of his sons, Lear. Between these two extremes all the more likable of Dickens’ characters provided him with roles.” Though well-to-do, he could not sign a check without moaning: “They will bring me to a pauper’s grave.” He could not pass a looking-glass without recoiling from his reflection, “crying, in the tones of the ghost in Hamlet: ‘O horrible! Most horrible.” Several evenings a week, this remarkable dramatizer would read aloud to his family. “In these recitations of prose and verse the incomparable variety of English vocabulary, the cadences and rhythms of the language, saturated my young mind.” The transition to the “violence and hardships” of British public-school life was painful and severe. The experience may well have seemed unarguable evidence, the reader surmises, that change is not likely to be for the better.

Stung to Life. Waugh entered Oxford in 1922, and felt “reborn in full youth.” He did the right thing by neglecting his studies almost totally, drinking heavily and getting deep into debt, just as he has described it repeatedly in his novels. It’s all here: the brilliant, idle, artistic young men, the champagne, the escapades, the anecdotes, the high teas with the “honeybuns and anchovy toast” that are almost a trademark of Waugh’s Oxford. And yet it is not here: the account is somehow crabbed and uncertain, the champagne flat, the real-life figures pale beside the fictional characters Waugh created out of them. For the inimitable flavor of that anchovy toast, the reader will find himself revisiting Brideshead instead.

Leaving Oxford after three years and without a degree, Waugh dabbled in art, kept on with his friends and his high expenses, finally had to look for work. He found himself fit for nothing but to join that “heterogeneous and undefinable underworld” from which prep-school masters were drawn. In desperation he took a job at a poor school on the seacoast in North Wales. It was to give him much of the locale and characters of his first novel, but first it gave him the worst year of his life. The boys were unruly, Waugh hardly competent. “Weeks passed in deep self-pity.”

Near the end of the school year he decided on suicide. One June night nepiled his clothes on the beach, with a note, and swam slowly out to sea. His melancholy was arrested by jellyfish, which stung him back to land and life. Still ahead were his books, his fame, his two marriages, his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Still with him was his conviction that “to have been born into a world of beauty, to die amid ugliness, is the common fate of all us exiles.”