300
PARTISAN REVIEW
While Waugh's sublime complacency about the rightness of his
values and standards may well be a necessary part of the confidence
in his own views-something the satirist must possess if he is to
expose the varieties of human folly-it is no less lamentable for that.
The pedantries, the carefully nourished fastidiousness, and the rail–
ings against modern culture, however wryly couched, rapidly
become predictable, with his wit appearing more as a life-denying
virtuosity than anything else: "A very polite gentle young man got
up at the end [of a lecture] and said: 'I should like to ask Mr. W
whether it is true, as we are always being told, that we are much
stupider
&
less cultured
&
amusing than undergraduates were in his
day' and I had to say 'Well yes it is' and he said very sadly 'I thought
so' and sat down. Sad." The letters are not redeemed, despite his
devout faith, by any noticeable human charity or compassion.
Waugh emerges from them as trivially ineffectual as Tony Last in
A
Handful ofDust]
who ends his days reading Dickens to a madman.
If
Tony pays a stiffer price for his shortcomings than Waugh does, the
artist's human failures nevertheless seem every bit as great as his
character's .
Waugh thought that his letters might eventually find their way
to an American university, providing "a nice nest egg for us all in
our senility," as they" are buying them at extravagant prices." He
would have been better served if they had in fact been stashed away
in the relatively private world of some school's prize collection oflet–
ters from famous twentieth-century writers. Certainly the published
volume of them does nothing for his reputation.
MICHAEL ROSENTHAL
THREE CHEERS FOR CAPITALISM
WEALTH AND POVERTY. By George Gilder.
Basic Books. $16.95.
The first thing that will strike any English reader of
George Gilder's
J..#alth and Poverty
is that no English economist or
political theorist could possibly have written it. Even Paul Johnson,
who has gone farther than any of his colleagues in adopting the man–
ners and ideas of the New Right, has quite different concerns. To
