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PARTISAN REVIEW
his experience in the Burma police, and it was only in the last six or
seven years of his life that he discovered that his talents lay
elsewhere: in polemics, above all, and in what Waugh, in his letter
of thanks for
Animal Farm,
called "ingenious and delightful allegory."
The term "allegory" is perhaps not entirely happy . What is in ques–
tion here, to be technical, is something in the manner of what the
French call the
conte philosophique,
for which there is strictly no
English term. Swift's
Gulliver's Travels,
Voltaire's
Candide,
orJohnson's
Rasselas
will do as instances, and it is certain that Orwell profoundly
admired Swift, as Waugh admired Voltaire. English fiction returns
to its eighteenth-century roots, or one of them, with Waugh's first
novel
Decline and Fall
(1928)
and Orwell's late masterpiece
Animal
Farm.
Characters are cut-outs, mental events are banned, and
names like Miles Malpractice in
Vile Bodies
tend to describe charac–
ter as lucidly as they might in
Pilgrim's Progress.
Waugh had seen the
opportunities of that defunct literary species almost twenty years
earlier than Orwell, but he had exhausted it, to his own satisfaction,
before war broke out in
1939,
so that
Brideshead
and the
Sword
oj
Honour
trilogy
(1952-1961)
are firmly in a realistic tradition. Orwell
saw Waugh's point rather be1atedly, but his example must have en–
couraged him. In a wartime
Tribune
article on Smollett (September
22, 1944),
he remarked that several English writers had recently
"tried to revive the picaresque tradition," citing Waugh and Aldous
Huxley-adding that the experiment had not been entirely suc–
cessful, if only because they betray a certain strain in their "eager
ef–
forts to be shocking." I presume Orwell is using the term
picaresque
rather loosely here, meaning something like episodically adven–
turous. That fits Waugh's first novels -
Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, A
Handful of Dust-well
enough. To an age that had been reading
Proust, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, such books must have seemed
startlingly diagrammatic and technically reactionary . But then
Waugh's whole artistic pose, like his political pose, is reactionary. In
fact his very first book, privately printed in
1926
when he was
twenty-three is an admiring essay on what was then among the most
despised and discredited of all schools of painting, the Pre–
Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Why did British fiction suddenly revive the
conte philosophique
and its fierce, diagrammatic crudities of tone and substance?
An–
thony Powell, who encouraged Waugh to write his first full-length
book, a life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(1928),
has suggested that
Waugh revived simplicity because he was himself simple:
