When the Going Was Good Read online

  EVELYN WAUGH

  When the Going Was Good

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter One

  A PLEASURE CRUISE IN 1929

  Chapter Two

  A CORONATION IN 1930

  Chapter Three

  GLOBE-TROTTING IN 1930-1

  Chapter Four

  A JOURNEY TO BRAZIL IN 1932

  Chapter Five

  A WAR IN 1935

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  When the Going Was Good

  Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903, the second son of publisher Arthur Waugh. He was educated at Lancing and at Hertford College, Oxford, where he read Modern History. Waugh taught at preparatory schools in North Wales and Buckinghamshire for a short time, which provided the inspiration for his first novel, Decline and Fall, published in 1928. In 1930 Waugh was received into the Catholic Church. He became one of the most fêted literary celebrities of his day with the publication of his satirical novels Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled widely, visiting the Mediterranean countries, the Middle East, Africa and South America, and publishing the celebrated travel books Labels (1930), Remote People (1931), Ninety-Two Days (1934) and Waugh in Abyssinia (1936). In 1939 he was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, serving in the Middle East and in Yugoslavia. In 1942 he published Put Out More Flags and then, in 1945, Brideshead Revisited, which became an international bestseller. Men at Arms, the first volume of a trilogy about the Second World War, came out in 1952 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The other volumes, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender, followed in 1955 and 1961. The semi-autobiographical novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold appeared in 1957 and A Little Learning, the first volume of his unfinished autobiography, in 1964. For many years Waugh lived with his second wife and six children in the English countryside. He died in 1966, acknowledged as one of the greatest novelists of his generation, and also renowned for the brilliance of his journalism, essays, diaries and correspondence, much of which was published to great acclaim after his death.

  Waugh said of his work: ‘I regard writing not as investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech and events that interest me’. Waugh’s obituary in Time magazine stated that Waugh had ‘developed a wickedly hilarious yet fundamentally religious assault on a century that, in his opinion, had ripped up the nourishing taproot of tradition and let wither all the dear things of the world.’ The New York Review of Books called him ‘King of the novelists’ and Clive James hailed him as ‘the supreme writer of English prose in the twentieth century … in direct line with Shakespeare and Dickens’.

  To

  BRYAN MOYNE, DIANA MOSLEY,

  DIANA COOPER, PERRY AND

  KITTY BROWNLOW;

  these were the friends in whose houses I wrote

  the following pages, and to whom I dedicated

  the books from which they are taken; to them,

  and to the memory of

  HAZEL LAVERY

  I inscribe anew these surviving fragments,

  with undiminished gratitude

  Preface

  THE following pages comprise all that I wish to preserve of the four travel books I wrote between the years 1929 and 1935: Labels, Remote People, Ninety-two Days and (a title not of my own choosing) Waugh in Abyssinia. These books have now been out of print for some time and will not be reissued. The first three were published by Messrs Duckworth & Co., the fourth by Longmans, Green & Co. There was a fifth book, Robbery under Law, about Mexico, which I am content to leave in oblivion, for it dealt little with travel and much with political questions. ‘To have travelled a lot,’ I wrote in the Introduction to that book, ‘to have spent, as I have done, the first twelve years of adult life on the move, is to this extent a disadvantage. At the age of thirty-five one needs to go to the moon, or some such place, to recapture the excitement with which one first landed at Calais. For many people Mexico has, in the past, had this lunar character. Lunar it still remains, but in no poetic sense. It is a waste land, part of a dead or, at any rate, a dying planet. Politics, everywhere destructive, have here dried up the place, frozen it, cracked it, and powdered it to dust. In the sixteenth century human life was disordered and talent stultified by the obsession of theology; today we are plague-stricken by politics. This is a political book.’ So let it lie in its own dust. Here I seek the moon landscape.

  From 1928 until 1937 I had no fixed home and no possessions which would not conveniently go on a porter’s barrow. I travelled continuously, in England and abroad. These four books, here in fragments reprinted, were the record of certain journeys, chosen for no better reason than that I needed money at the time of their completion; they were pedestrian, day-to-day accounts of things seen and people met, interspersed with commonplace information and some rather callow comments. In cutting them to their present shape, I have sought to leave a purely personal narrative in the hope that there still lingers round it some trace of vernal scent.

  Each book, I found on re-reading, had a distinct and slightly grimmer air, as, year by year, the shades of the prison-house closed. In Labels I looked only for pleasure. Not uncritically I examined the credentials of its varied sources and watched the loss and gain of other seekers. Baroque, the luxurious and surprising; cookery, wine, eccentric individuals, grottoes by day, the haunts of the underworld at night; these things I, like a thousand others, sought in the Mediterranean.

  How much we left unvisited and untasted in those splendid places! ‘Europe could wait. There would be a time for Europe,’ I thought; ‘all too soon the days would come when I needed a man at my side to put up my easel and carry my paints; when I could not venture more than an hour’s journey from a good hotel; when I needed soft breezes and mellow sunshine all day long; then I would take my old eyes to Germany and Italy. Now, while I had the strength, I would go to the wild lands where man had deserted his post and the jungle was creeping back to its old strongholds.’ Thus ‘Charles Ryder’; thus myself. These were the years when Mr Peter Fleming went to the Gobi Desert, Mr Graham Greene to the Liberian hinterland; Robert Byron – vital today, as of old, in our memories; all his exuberant zest in the opportunities of our time now, alas! tragically and untimely quenched – to the ruins of Persia. We turned our backs on civilization. Had we known, we might have lingered with ‘Palinurus’; had we known that all that seeming-solid, patiently built, gorgeously ornamented structure of Western life was to melt overnight like an ice-castle, leaving only a puddle of mud; had we known man was even then leaving his post. Instead, we set off on our various stern roads; I to the Tropics and the Arctic, with the belief that barbarism was a dodo to be stalked with a pinch of salt. The route of Remote People was easy going; the Ninety-two Days were more arduous. We have most of us marched and made camp since then, gone hungry and thirsty, lived where pistols are flourished and fired. At that time it seemed an ordeal, an initiation to manhood.

  Then in 1935 came the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and I returned there, but no longer as a free traveller. As a war correspondent, lightly as I took my duties and the pretensions of my colleagues, I was in the livery of the new age. The ensuing book betrayed the change. I have omitted many pages of historical summary and political argument. Re-reading them, after the experience of recent years, I found little to retract. Hopes proved dupes; it is possible that present fears may be liars. This is not the place in which to attempt to disentangle the post hoc from the propter hoc of disaster.
<
br />   My own travelling days are over, and I do not expect to see many travel books in the near future. When I was a reviewer, they used, I remember, to appear in batches of four or five a week, cram-full of charm and wit and enlarged Leica snapshots. There is no room for tourists in a world of ‘displaced persons’. Never again, I suppose, shall we land on foreign soil with letter of credit and passport (itself the first faint shadow of the great cloud that envelops us) and feel the world wide open before us. That is as remote today as ‘Yorick’s’ visit to Paris, when he had to be reminded by the landlord that their countries were at war. It will be more remote tomorrow. Some sort of reciprocal ‘Strength-through-Joy’, dopo-lavoro system may arise in selected areas; others, not I, gifted with the art of pleasing public authorities may get themselves despatched abroad to promote ‘Cultural Relations’; the very young, perhaps, may set out like the Wandervogels of the Weimar period; lean, lawless, aimless couples with rucksacks, joining the great army of men and women without papers, without official existence, the refugees and deserters, who drift everywhere today between the barbed wire. I shall not, by my own wish, be among them.

  Perhaps it is a good thing for English literature. In two generations the air will be fresher and we may again breed great travellers like Burton and Doughty. I never aspired to being a great traveller. I was simply a young man, typical of my age; we travelled as a matter of course. I rejoice that I went when the going was good.

  E.W.

  Stinchcombe

  1945

  Chapter One

  A Pleasure Cruise in 1929

  (From Labels)

  In February 1929 London was lifeless and numb, seeming to take its temper from Westminster, where the Government was dragging out the weeks of its last session. Talking films were just being introduced, and had set back by twenty years the one vital art of the century. There was not even a good murder case. And besides this it was intolerably cold. The best seller of the preceding months had been Mrs Woolf’s Orlando, and it seemed as though Nature were setting out to win some celestial Hawthornden Prize by imitation of that celebrated description of the Great Frost. People shrank, in those days, from the icy contact of a cocktail glass, like the Duchess of Malfi from the dead hand, and crept stiff as automata from their draughty taxis into the nearest tube-railway station, where they stood, pressed together for warmth, coughing and sneezing among the evening papers.

  So I packed up all my clothes and two or three solemn books, such as Spengler’s Decline of the West, and a great many drawing materials, for two of the many quite unfulfilled resolutions which I made about this trip were that I was going to do some serious reading and drawing. Then I got into an aeroplane and went to Paris where I spent the night with some kind, generous, and wholly delightful Americans. They wanted to show me a place called ‘Brick-Top’s’, which was then very popular. It was no good going to Brickey’s, they said, until after twelve, so we went to Florence’s first. We drank champagne because it is one of the peculiar modifications of French liberty that one can drink nothing else.

  Then we went to an underground public house called the New York Bar. When we came in all the people beat on the tables with little wooden hammers, and a young Jew who was singing made a joke about the ermine coat which one of our party was wearing. We drank some more, much nastier, champagne and went to Brick-Top’s, but when we got there, we found a notice on the door saying, ‘Opening at four. Bricky’, so we started again on our rounds.

  We went to a café called Le Fétiche, where the waitresses wore dinner-jackets and asked the ladies in the party to dance. I was interested to see the fine, manly girl in charge of the cloakroom very deftly stealing a silk scarf from an elderly German.

  We went to the Plantation, and to the Music Box, where it was so dark we could hardly see our glasses (which contained still nastier champagne), and to Shéherazade, where they brought us five different organs of lamb spitted together between onions and bay leaves, all on fire at the end and very nice to eat.

  We went to Kasbek which was just like Shéherazade.

  Finally, at four, we went to Brick-Top’s. Brick-Top came and sat at our table. She seemed the least bogus person in Paris. It was broad daylight when we left; then we drove to the Halles and ate fine, pungent onion soup at Le Père Tranquille, while one of the young ladies in our party bought a bundle of leeks and ate them raw. I asked my host if all his evenings were like this. He said, no, he made a point of staying at home at least one night a week to play poker.

  It was during about the third halt in the pilgrimage I have just described that I began to recognize the same faces crossing and re-crossing our path. There seemed to be about a hundred or so people in Montmartre that night, all doing the same round as ourselves.

  Only two incidents of this visit to Paris live vividly in my memory.

  One of these was the spectacle of a man in the Place Beauveau, who had met with an accident which must, I think, be unique. He was a man of middle age and, to judge by his bowler hat and frock coat, of the official class, and his umbrella had caught alight. I do not know how this can have happened. I passed him in a taxi-cab, and saw him in the centre of a small crowd, grasping it still by the handle and holding it at arm’s length so that the flames should not scorch him. It was a dry day and the umbrella burnt flamboyantly. I followed the scene as long as I could from the little window in the back of the car, and saw him finally drop the handle and push it, with his foot, into the gutter. It lay there smoking, and the crowd peered at it curiously before moving off. A London crowd would have thought that the best possible joke, but none of the witnesses laughed, and no one to whom I have told this story in England has believed a word of it.

  The other incident happened at a night club called Le Grand Écart. To those who relish the flavour of ‘Period’, there is a rich opportunity for reflection on the change that came over this phrase when the Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec gave place to the Paris of M. Cocteau. Originally it means the ‘splits’ ’ that very exacting figure in which the dancer slides her feet farther and farther apart until her body rests on the floor with her legs straight out on either side of her. It was thus that La Goulue and La Mélonite – ‘the Maenad of the Decadence’ – were accustomed to complete their pas seul, with a roguish revelation of thigh between black silk stocking and frilled petticoat. It is not so today. It is the name of a night club with little coloured electric bulbs, decorated with coils of rope and plate glass mirrors; on the tables are little illuminated tanks of water, with floating sheets of limp gelatine in imitation of ice. Shady young men in Charvet shirts sit round the bar repairing with powderpuff and lipstick the ravages of grenadine and crême de cacao. I was there one evening in a small party. A beautiful and splendidly dressed Englishwomen – who, as they say, shall be nameless – came to the next table. She was with a very nice-looking, enviable man who turned out later to be a Belgian baron. She knew someone in our party and there was an indistinct series of introductions. She said, ‘What did you say that boy’s name was?’

  They said, ‘Evelyn Waugh.’

  She said, ‘Who is he?’

  None of my friends knew. One of them suggested that she thought I was an English writer.

  She said, ‘I knew it. He is the one person in the world I have been longing to meet.’ (You must please bear with this part of the story: it all leads to my humiliation in the end.) ‘Please move up so that I can come and sit next to him.’

  Then she came and talked to me.

  She said, ‘I should never have known from your photographs that you were a blond.’

  I should not have known how to answer that, but fortunately there was no need as she went straight on. ‘Only last week I was reading an article by you in the Evening Standard. It was so beautiful that I cut it out and sent it to my mother.’

  I said, ‘I got ten guineas for it.’

  At this moment the Belgian baron asked her to dance. She said, ‘No, no. I am drinking in the genius of
this wonderful young man.’ Then she said to me, ‘You know, I am psychic. The moment I came into this room tonight I knew that there was a great personality here, and I knew that I should find him before the evening was over.’

  I suppose that real novelists get used to this kind of thing. It was new to me and very nice. I had only written two very dim books and still regarded myself less as a writer than an out-of-work private schoolmaster.

  She said, ‘You know, there is only one other great genius in this age. Can you guess his name?’

  I suggested Einstein? No … Charlie Chaplin? No … James Joyce? No … Who?

  She said, ‘Maurice Dekobra. I must give a little party at the Ritz for you to meet him. I should feel I had at least done something to justify my life if I had introduced you two great geniuses of the age. One must do something to justify one’s life, don’t you think, or don’t you?’

  Everything went very harmoniously for a time. Then she said something that made me a little suspicious, ‘You know, I so love your books that I never travel without taking them all with me. I keep them in a row by my bed.’

  ‘I suppose you aren’t by any chance confusing me with my brother Alec? He has written many more books than I.’

  ‘What did you say his name was?’

  ‘Alec.’

  ‘Yes, of course. What’s your name, then?’

  ‘Evelyn.’

  ‘But … but they said you wrote.’

  ‘Yes, I do a little. You see, I couldn’t get any other sort of job.’

  Her disappointment was as frank as her friendliness had been. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘how very unfortunate.’

  Then she went to dance with her Belgian, and when she sat down she went to her former table. When we parted she said vaguely, ‘We’re sure to run into one another again.’