Steven Marcus
EVELYN WAUGH AND THE
ART OF ENTERTAINMENT
It is almost certain that Evelyn Waugh is the finest enter–
tainer alive.
It
is certain that both Waugh and the kind of book he
writes are supremely distasteful to many of the most serious people. One
of the most intelligent men I ever met told me that life was too short
to waste any of it on Waugh. Another replied to my recommendation
that since he never read for pleasure anyway there wasn't much point
in his reading something that didn't at least
pretend
to offer more.
Waugh has been variously characterized as nasty, hateful, snobbish,
trivial, reactionary, vindictive, fawning, immature, pompous, and rude,
ascriptions which are substantially true yet somehow beside the point.
The general repugnance of the contemporary intellectual for the litera–
ture of entertainment is, I think, related to his dislike of Waugh; one
cannot applaud either without sounding dangerously like some "smart"
radio book-reviewer, or like a superannuated Oxford don feebly praising
the delighting power of art. Our culture has to an unprecedented degree
succeeded in dividing our entertainment from our elevation. Today most
of us find our real entertainment in the movies or television or by
watching sports. We read, on the other hand, with an heroic seriousness;
we bring great expectations to literature, and although we are pleased
by our ability to discover and follow the subtle dialectic of it, we are
quick to mistrust any piece of writing which does not seem immediately
to challenge profound assumptions or elicit the most delicate moral
choices. Our less ponderous relations to literature have suffered an at–
trition, and it is possible that a certain kind of literature-the kind I
assume Waugh to represent-is losing the capacity to express anything
significant, just as about a hundred years ago the personal essay and
the art of verse lost theirs.
An entertainer is a writer who does not press upon us the full
complexities of life, who does not demand from us a total seriousness
in making moral judgments, and who does not necessarily bring to
