Vile, Silly Bodies

I have a few old favorite writers with whom I salt the Stack. Anthony Burgess, Lawrence Durrell come to mind. One of them is Evelyn Waugh, and I've just read Vile Bodies (1930), published when he was 27. I read Waugh essentially for laughs. He is a social satirist with the sharpest of tongues, and a keen ear for English (as in the country, not the language) accents and idioms. England is a country where accents reflect class as much as they do region, and Waugh epitomizes this very English practice of using idiom to portray the farcical collisions of parallel social worlds.

Waugh is also a master of English silliness. "Silliness": not exactly absurdity, although closely related (Monty Python), there is a streak of adolescence running through English humor. Part of this is catharsis for the socially hyper-vigilant, protocol-bound English, part of it reflects a feeling of insularity and of belonging to a closed society, like the "public school" communities that produced so many English writers. There is a kind of showing off to the other lads, talented enough to get away with it with teacher (if history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce, that would be Evelyn Waugh:wicked::Kingsley Amis:obnoxious). Other notable in-crowd entertainments of the period are Ronald Firbank whose antics have not aged as well, and P. G. Wodehouse's very funny stories of Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves, which are still very funny and still have a satiric bite (an Englishman in graduate school with me in the States frowned once at the mention of Wodehouse: "I don't approve of all that class snobbery," he said, obviously having no idea).

In Vile Bodies a drunken socialite, strip-searched at customs coming over from France, uses her social connections to the Prime Minister to exact revenge, only to precipitate the fall of the government when the PMs mousy daughter has the Bright Young Things over to 10 Downing Street in the wee hours of the morning. The writer of a London gossip column commits suicide when he can no longer get invited to the right parties, and his replacement finds success making people up and touting awful restaurants and clubs as the next hot place, although his attempt to get London's gentlemen to wear green bowlers meets with little success. And so on. The first half, where the Bright Young Things are rampaging around London and environs, is better than the second, mostly taken up with the stilted and abortive courtship of Adam and Nina against the backdrop of Nina's deranged old gentleman father and his crumbling estate.

This is the Waugh that everyone knows: sharp-tongued, witty, laugh-out-loud funny. My favorite of these is Scoop (1938, the first Waugh novel I read), more lampooning of the newspapers which in Waugh's universe are filled with the sheerly false as well as some great sequences in British East Africa, which is also the scene of Black Mischief (1932; Waugh's inhumanity to man certainly extends to Africans towards whom he is patently racist. The only thing that can be said in his defense is that, come on, he hates everybody). These three and Decline and Fall (1928, his first novel) are the best satirical novels and they all deliver: you will laugh while you read them.

But it is easy to be misled about what Waugh is, easy to identify him as someone reveling in the gratuitous privilege of classista interwar Britain. He is not that. He is in fact deeply critical of this society, drawing attention through conspicuous absence to the generation of young men who lost their lives in World War I and chillingly prescient about more wars to come. On the last page of Vile Bodies two officers drink champagne with a prostitute in the general's staff car in the middle of a devastated battlefield "and presently, like a circling typhoon, the sounds of battle began to return." George Orwell described Waugh as "about as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions." I love George Orwell but I doubt he grasped Waugh.

Waugh is also a deeply religious man who seems to embody secular modernism precisely because he is at war against it. There are occasional glimpses behind the mask in the satirical novels, but his masterpiece is Brideshead Revisited (1945) (I remember as a teenager thinking that I really needed to read Brideshead first!). In this novel he is in the zone, at the peak of his powers as a stylist, and the writing is beautiful enough to carry the reader along through the disquisition on the modern loss of moral foundations. Come to think of it, he reminds me of Nabakov this way: most of Nabakov's work is dark, well-written, and under-read (Laughter in the Dark, Despair, Invitation to a Beheading), but Lolita rises above the rest by the power of the prose itself. Brideshead Revisited is Waugh's equivalent, the masterpiece.

There is much more. There is a trilogy of war novels (published together under the title Sword of Honor) that I have not read but that is not regarded as his best work. I have read A Handful of Dust (1934) which in my opinion is too rough to be considered "satire" although I can imagine being in a dark enough mood to be amused. There is quite a bit of travel writing that I do intend to explore.

Aut Tunc, aut Nunquam

"It's now or never." This epigram from Nunquam sums up Lawrence Durrell's approach to both writing and living. A wondrous childhood in much-beloved India followed by a painful adolescence in much-despised England formed a man ravenous for cultural experience and obsessed with authenticity of feeling. Durrell wandered widely ("peripatetic" is the word), spending the last decades of his life in France, but the eastern Mediterranean, cradle and crossroads of the world, was his great love.

Exiled from Greece to Egypt by WWII, his first marriage breaking under the strain, he produced in 1957-1960 the novels collectively known as The Alexandria Quartet, a gem of bohemian sensibility and psychological style perfectly timed between the Beat 50s and the Psychedelic 60s (neither of which cultural movements Durrell, born in 1912 and the expatriot's expatriot, with little interest in the US, ever had much to do with). If you're going to read Durrell for the first time (lucky you) the Quartet is it. After that, much of his best writing is non-fiction, his writing about Greece is priceless and my personal favorite is Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953), a perfect little book that puts one in the company of about as good an evening's companion as you are likely to find. Also not to be missed are his humorous memoirs of working for the British diplomatic authorities in Greece after the war, Esprit de Corps (1957), Stiff Upper Lip (1958) and Sauve Qui Peut (1966).

So I added to the Stack The Revolt of Aphrodite, a 1974 omnibus edition of his second novel sequence Tunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970). This came up to be read just in time for our summer travels, a happy circumstance (at Christmas I ended up with Cormac McCarthy, not exactly festive).

To me "bohemian" means as much "worldly" as it does "arty," the timeless sensibility of the citizen of the world. Society at large moves through periods of relative liberality or prudishness, but the true bohemian lives outside of fashion, always creative, always subversive, always a mix of civility and uninhibitedness, in whatever city, in whatever time. Literateness, the ultimate product of true literacy, is prized above all: understanding is the savor of life. The true bohemian is their own life's work. The masterpiece is not a novel or a painting, but a conversation over a drink. This is the appeal of Durrell.

Having said that, The Revolt of Aphrodite is for established Durrell fans like me to move on to. It is not as good as the Quartet. That's hardly damning. The books are well worth reading. Tunc, the first one, is better than Nunquam, which works through the concepts and the business of Durrell's ideas, and thus lacks some of the character and color of the earlier passages.

Felix Charlock is a scientist and engineer by training, interested in the technology of audiology and the nature of speech. Thus are set up two of the major themes here, first the tension between the natural, intuitive artistic sensibility and the controlling, analytic scientific sensibility, and second the nature of memory and of the narratives that we construct to represent our lives and selves to ourselves and others. Charlock (perhaps resonances of Shylock, as in Shakespeare, but easier to feel resonances of Sherlock, as in Holmes) is a typical Durrell character, moving easily among an elite group of professionals and tattered scions of local nobility, starting the evening at the grand but crumbling villa before moving on to dusky bars and brothels, bedding the local talent with seemingly no effort (Durrell is old school so far as the libido is concerned). The city is Athens, later we are in a much more impressionistic Istanbul and much of Nunquam takes place in London.

Athens is true civilization, Turkey Asiatic barbarousness and England European soullessness. There is a good character named Caradoc, a brilliant but erratic architect. Charlock is engaged to record Caradoc's speech at the Parthenon; Hippolyta, a wealthy local, has organized the speech as a social event. I didn't expect Durrell to actually write the speech. This sort of thing is very difficult to do, as when an author has a character who is a great poet or scientist. The usual practice is simply to refer to the character's talents and let the reader imagine the rest. But Durrell gives us quite a brilliant disquisition on architecture, power, and mythology. There is a sense that Durrell wants to present some of his philosophical work. Many of the characters make pronouncements that are well-formed aphorisms.

Charlock becomes an employee of "the firm," a corporate entity, ostensibly mercantile, that has grown into a kind of secret society, controlling the lives of its members. The characters thus have a very literal version of the moral dilemma of integrity and autonomy vs. worldly success. In Nunquam we move on to heavier allegory, as one of the twisted Svengalis of the firm sets the project of constructing an artificial woman, a replica of the beautiful Iolanthe, a Greek woman of the streets who has become a film star and then died tragically. Durrell isn't interested in the science fiction possibilities here. He doesn't bother trying to explain how an artificial woman might be possible. He wants to think about the difference between our idea of a lover, or of an object of desire, and the real person (or the unreal person, for that matter).

As I said, Durrell is old school and it must be said that there is a fair degree of misogyny in the air. The women characters are physically beautiful but not personally so, although here as elsewhere (Justine) Durrell acknowledges women's sexuality with the same frank acceptance as men's. Part of the sense of rough treatment of women characters in Durrell stems from the fact that they fall into sexual liasons just as easily and naturally as the men, but that is perhaps closer to real life after all.
Last word on The Revolt of Aphrodite: if you already know that you like Durrell, you'll enjoy more of the same. First-timers, I refer you to The Alexandria Quartet.