140
PARTISAN REVIEW
I disagree with the view that Lord Berners's lilli e novels are "poor
stuff" or that Childers's
The Riddle of the Sands
is "a lmost unread–
able." But "happen to agree" or "disagree" is all that one can do, and
much the same can be said of most of Sykes's discussions of Waugh's
own books. Moreover his occasional fault-finding does not, I feel,
correspond with the way he and most of us read and remember novels.
The novels that live for us are accepted as a whole and the " faults "
become merely characteristics. And at his weakes t Sykes sounds like a
school report. Here is a complete paragraph on
Officers and Gentle–
men:
A fine novel, not open to criticism of essentials or essential points,
with merits far outweighing blemishes.
Sykes's critique, then, is apt to have th e defects as well as the
virtues of the unacademic-not so much the occasional inaccuracies
and misspelt names, but the vagueness and looseness of his descrip–
tions. The chief exceptioris are his comments on Waugh's travel books,
where he has more to tell us than any other writer on Waugh, and his
long examination of the
Sword of Honour
trilogy. Here Sykes is at his
best as a critic, bringing out its way of relating fact and fiction ,
autobiography and fantasy, with a kind of intelligent authority that no
one else has yet shown in writing of these books. He is also very
sensible about possible influences or analogues-Firbank, Aldous
Huxley, Max Beerbohm, Saki-making the interes ting point that the
work of Scott Fitzgerald, with whom Waugh is sometimes compared,
was unknown to Waugh until his own style and mode had been
formed . And he obviously speaks with an authority founded on his
own conversations with Waugh about the extent to which this or that
character had a living original. Indeed , there is perhaps a little too
much of this , given that Sykes is eager to emphasize-and very
rightly-that Waugh was first and foremost an artist, so that it is
unwise to treat any of his books as a
roman
Ii
clef.
On the who le, then , what we get from Sykes is the story of a
writer's life, interspersed with intelligent and fairly intcresting com–
ment on his works , rather than a profound critique with biographical
allusions. And this story is worth telling and is well told . That Waugh
was a comic genius-perhaps, apart from P.G. Wodehousc, the out–
standing English comic genius of our time-is widely recognized; and
in his best work , such as
A Handful of Dust,
he related the tragic to the
ridiculous in a manner wholly his own, easy
to
illustrate, though
