WAUGH AND ENTERTAINMENT
349
experience a mature and searching intelligence. Usually, his works lack
a significant form, though they may be rich in individual, internal pat–
terns and correspondences. When he is inspired he may produce a
work of art, but most often he is content with being artful. His writing
charms us because it is clever, observant, and sprightly; the appearance
of his prose is nearly always immaculate. Yet because we no longer feel
it unobjectionable to give ourselves to these virtues unless they seem
to promise greater significances residing within, we try to justify our
affection for some of our entertainers by passing them off as serious
artists. One of the minor annoyances of recent years has been the steady
flow of essays about Henry Green, Graham Greene, and Joyce Cary;
repeatedly it has been "demonstrated" that each of them is a consider–
able and important novelist. They have, it is true, sometimes aspired
higher than Waugh, but their larger efforts generally display lack of
clarity, patterns that correspond only to each other, and a murky por–
tentousness which does little more than communicate the writer's will
to express something beyond his understanding. Most of the time, how–
ever, these writers, like Waugh, are fundamentally and simply inter–
ested by what happens in society and how it happens; the surfaces and
appearances of things, the styles in which men face the world, the ways
they get around each other, and themselves, the rituals through which
they pass each day, and the minute details of the crises they must en–
dure-these, rather than the more inclusive concerns of the serious
writer, make up their purview. The entertainer is primarily interested in
the facts; he knows that the facts, if they are delivered with clarity
and relevance, will delight and reward us. His stories are profuse in
incidents and anecdotes. He lets us know that the most implausible things
happen every day, and thus he makes us less skeptical and hard-bitten
about the possibilities to which we are bound.
Waugh is one of these victims of our sanctions about the serious.
I have frequently read that he is a brilliant satirist and that his early
novels are a blistering, comprehensive satire of fashionable pre-war
society.
If
Decline and Fall
or
Vile Bodies
are brilliant satires, I wonder
what hyperboles should be reserved for
The Dunciad
or
Pride and
Prejudice
or
Don Juan
or
Our Mutual Friend.
Even if Waugh is jux–
taposed to a less momentous satirist, Peacock for example, or to a
modern one, Mary McCarthy, say, it should be apparent that he is
doing something else. For Waugh is essentially a comedian, and his early
novels are celebrations of Mayfair, not satires of it. Nothing is more
patent than that he loved the Hon. Agatha Runcible who disappeared
in the company of a racing car and ended in drunken delirium in a
