570
PARTISAN REVIEW
and Dorothy Sayers we have the positive, entirely reverent, statementj
in
Wodehouse, Waugh and Nancy Mitford, the negative statement, ap–
parently irreverent, but fundamentally respectful. By declaring his fond–
ness for the first three, Mr. Usborne shows the niceness of his nature.
They are the three that any uncomplicated boy would prefer, with–
as he grows older-the addition of Miss Mitford, who can describe a lark
in the proper spirit. She is a traitor, of course j she bolted to France and
went in for a type of French Gentleman, but the French parts of her
books are mercifully unreal. England triumphs, in spite of Miss Mit–
ford's perverseness. No schoolboy, however, could like Lord Peter Wim–
sey. His suite in the Albany (or is it "in Albany"?), his thick carpets,
his first editions, were not described with the right kind of ease and he
boasted a plaintive soul. We suspected him of having been invented by
his butler and the little swots amongst us noticed that the French of
his
entourage
was sometimes incorrect. Nor could any schoolboy be really
happy with Wodehousej Wooster is too much the aristocratic ass and
Jeeves is a cardboard Figaro without the humanity of his great original.
As
for Waugh, he presents us with a completely decadent gentleman
who, at first, is convincingly unreliable about money and women and
then, alas, becomes pompous about wine and Catholicism-a gentleman
who is half
in
real literature and half out of it, and cannot therefore
be enjoyed on either level. Yates, Buchan and Sapper are not am–
biguous in this way. Their work is-basically-healthy, and sometimes
very clever, nonsense, in which adventure is the main element. The only
one I know well is Buchan, but Mr. Usborne quotes liberally from all
three. He claims that they did more to shape his personality than the
accepted great writers, and he implies that they were the really formative
influences on the whole of his generation. There is probably more
truth in this than at first appears. One can imagine sincere and inter–
ested readers of Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and Virginia
Woolf who, as soon as they closed these authors, fell back on to the
values of Yates, Buchan and Sapper, or on to the similar but rather
more complex systems of Sayers, Wodehouse, Waugh and Mitford. One
may even wonder at times whether the good writers themselves do not,
in their weaker moments, fall back on to conventional values. It would
not be fantastic, for instance, to work out an Eliot/Sayers/Buchan rela–
tionship or another between Lawrence and Nancy Mitford. The impor–
tance of Yates, Buchan and Sapper lies in the fact that they presented
the simplest and rosiest picture of the Gentleman in his last phase. They
have hardly any of the uneasiness which can be felt in the other writers
mentioned, although the Idea of Evil is always hovering in various sym–
bolic forms at the back of their works, because, of course, there can be
no adventure without a sense of evil.
