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PARTISAN REVIEW
nursing home, or that he loved Lady Metroland, proprietress of an in–
ternational chain of brothels, or that he loved all the raffish, bored,
useless, picaresque characters who fill the pages of his earliest novels.
These novels, and
Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust
and
Scoop,
are
successful because of the purity of their comic vision-they are elaborated
spoofs. Remarking the absurdity and waste of a particular social life,
they omit its real consequences. The worst fate that overtakes anyone
in them (besides, of course, being bored) is being eaten by cannibals, or
reading Dickens aloud to a madman-grisly consummations, but merely
grisly. Although Waugh understood that the assumptions his "bright
young things" lived by were preposterous, he was honest enough not
to deny that, with certain qualifications, their standards were sympathetic
to his own. They were thundering snobs, xenophobes, opportunists, ig–
noramuses, and thoroughly cultivated ladies and gentlemen. Like Waugh
they were more outspoken than an American can easily imagine, and
like Waugh they accepted their misfortune in being born three hundred
years too late with an abandoned equanimity. In his early novels Waugh
was able to sustain a tone of bemused mournfulness over a society bent
on smashing itself to pieces, while at the same time depicting the feckless
innocence of both those who were most active in the smashing and
those most hurt by it. The matrix of his comedy is this conjunction of
the most abrupt and violent events with the most innocent villains.
Waugh's initial vein was a shallow one, though, and sometime in
the late '30s it began to run thin; Basil Seal, who had once blithely
survived a meal made of his sweetheart's flesh, could not survive his
own self-pity, and Waugh's repining over the evanescence of his genera–
tion soured his appetite for comedy. He wrote a couple of slim, adequate
satires,
The Loved One
and
Scott-King's Modern Europe,
and he
wrote two pretentious novels about his religion,
Brideshead Revisited
and
H elena,
his most conspicuous failures . They failed because Waugh's
snobbery and growing biliousness could not accommodate themselves
to humane, religious impulses; indeed, they overrode his Christianity
and made it seem just slightly disreputable. He recognized this at the
very beginning of his next novel,
Men at Arms,
in which he diagnosed
his hero's religious peculiarities: "But Guy had no wish to persuade or
convince or to share his opinions with anyone. Even in his religion
he felt no brotherhood. Often he wished he lived in penal times when
Broome had been a solitary outpost of the Faith, surrounded by aliens.
Sometimes he imagined himself serving the last mass for the last Pope in
a catacomb at the end of the world." Even Catholicism, most hierarchic
of religious dispensations, is too democratic for Waugh, whose admiration
