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PARTISAN REVIEW
assessing their work and that of others, and providing interesting
information not otherwise available, these letters considerably
enhance our understanding not only of their art, but of the minds
that produced it.
None of this can be said about Waugh's letters. With one fasci–
nating exception, in which he writes to the Archbishop ofWestminster
to defend
Black Mischief
against an ignorant review he received in a
Catholic journal, he does not deal with his own work or, in any seri–
ous way, with anybody else ' s either. We do not come away from this
volume with any enlarged sense of Waugh the novelist or reviewer,
with any insight into the workings of his creative imagination.
Although obvious references are made to what Waugh spent his life
doing, namely writing, the volume adds nothing at
all
to our under–
standing of him as a writer. From the point of view of someone wish–
ing to know more about Waugh, then , the letters are very decidedly
not interesting. They do not in any significant way complement the
novels and diaries as ways of knowing his mind.
If
we relinquish this expectation-a painful one to give up–
and one that drives us, for example, with substantial gratification
through the almost interminable volumes of Virginia Woolf's let–
ters-what are we left with? Simply a random sampling of Waugh
being his trivial, gossipy, wicked, and cutting self. Mark Amory, the
editor, clearly aspired to nothing more , and it is only fair to meet the
Waugh he chose on his own grounds.
Even on his own turf, however, the encounter with Waugh is
not a pleasant or edifying one. There are, to be sure, the splendid
bitcheries of a man who seems to have marinated all his life in a
sense of his vast superiority, who raised the notion of the supercilious
to cosmic heights. Effortlessly anti-everything in the true British
upper-class manner, Waugh flicks his disdain out at the world with
the ease of a Borg passing a leaden-footed opponent at the net.
Whether yids, niggers, Americans, the French, reporters, children,
esteemed twentieth-century artists (Picasso, Joyce, Proust,
Lawrence, Auden)-modern civilization generally-Waugh has an
elegantly unkind word for them all. No one who dislikes everything
can be
all
bad , to paraphrase W C . Fields, and I would be the first
to admit that Waugh frequently strikes home tellingly. But finally, to
what end? "I can only be funny when I am complaining about
something," he writes, and the diagnosis speaks to the ultimately
sterile quality of the correspondence, if not of the man himself.
