WAUGH AND ENTERT A I NMEN T
353
The schoolboy takes his grisliness lightly, and Waugh's sense of sudden
violence and terror is tinged with a schoolboy's fascination for the blood–
curdling.
2
Stalky's dead cat planted in the ceiling of a dormitory is in
its effect much like Basil Seal's feasting on his fiancee's carcass at the
cannibal's banquet, or Agatha Runcible's crack-up, or all the hopeless
and bloody fiascos of the Halberdiers and Commandos in Norway, Dakar,
or Crete. The conventions of the school and of a gentleman's war are
often fortunately congruent-they are both extensions of the "prodigious
booby trap" that life and the headmaster have set for all boys.
Waugh unhappily grants, however, that the world allows increas–
ingly fewer opportunities to the kind of gentleman he most admires.
Men at Arms
and
Officers and Gentlemen
cover that period of modern
history when, he believes, acts of honor were still feasible-the period
from the signing of the Russo-German Alliance to the German invasion
of Russia. Guy Crouchback had read of the Russo-German agreement
with joy: "a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason–
the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off;
the modern age in arms." By the end of
Officers and Gentlemen,
Guy
is ready to concede that he was suffering from an hallucination, and
he wakes again "in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies
and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering
into dishonour." The dishonoring accident of Russia's becoming an ally
is contemporaneous with Guy's loss of faith in the purely aristocratic
character, for he discovers that the officer he considered to be the
epitome of gentlemanly honor, Ivor Claire, deserted his men at Crete
in unforgivable circumstances. The modern world, "bounded by barbed
wire and reeking of carbolic," triumphs, and the loss of the older values
is dramatized when Guy's former wife, an athletically promiscuous
beauty, goes off with Trimmer, a one-time beautician on the Cunard
Line, now the trumpery hero of a trumpery Commando victory. The
2. I recall once hearing Henry Green expostulate on this topic at one of
those embarrassing and aimless "discussions" that university English societies
convene for visitinJ dignitaries. He apparently was content with saying very
little in a very gnomic way until he hit upon the subject of humor, whereupon
he suddenly became expansive. He didn't try to define what he believed to be
funny, but illustrated his sense of the comic by telling a number of his favorite
stories. It struck me then that almost every one of them concerned life at
school, and a great many of them were gory. His favorite (it set him howling
while he told it), the humorous gist of which I cannot for the life of me re–
member, involved a schoolmaster who is enticed into a room whose ceiling is
bathed in blood. This particular genre of hilarity struck me as more curious
than funny, and I think it is valuable to point out that the singularly English
interest in the blood-curdling-we find it regularly even in E. M. Forster–
has its profound conpection with school rather than family
lift:.
