Work Suspended is the most enigmatic of Waugh's writings. Its mockery of socialism and philistinism is of course quite in keeping with his rôle as the right-wing Catholic apologist defending 'civilization' from the 'barbarians', but the emotional intensity of the work, expressed in a more conventional and committed prose style than that of the five early novels is surprising. Although unfinished, Work Suspended has an evasive cohesion, perhaps because the characterization appears to be based on values and assumptions which derive from a private world beyond the text. (p. 302)

Even when allowance is made for the narrating persona, Waugh appears to be laying his literary soul open in an entirely new fashion. It is true that the death of the old and the birth of a new, 'dark' age had been his subject since 1930 (Vile Bodies concludes with a scene set on 'the biggest battlefield in the history of the world') but this strange, incomplete tale alters his whole approach. What, then, is the significance of [the novel's] disparate figures? And why, when it is of such high quality, did he find himself unable to complete their history? (pp. 302-03)

[Work Suspended] seems simply a reaction to the war as a cultural watershed beyond which 'all our lives, as we had constructed them, quietly came to an end'…. The battlefield of Vile Bodies had been a [useful metaphor; but] the sirens of World War II represented an assault on civilization which necessitated a practical response from Waugh. In 1942 he was an enlisted soldier. It is therefore unremarkable, we might say, that he should have altered his lighter pre-war style to meet this challenge. (p. 303)

This explanation is only part of the story. A profound sense of spiritual exile … characterised Waugh's life during the early thirties. He poured his energy into travelling and (with great difficulty) into the conscious artistry of his novels…. His journalism … reveals a serious approach to aesthetics…. Clarity, concision, the use of the 'refrain' rather than statement, a sense of fantasy and of the self-supporting reality of a work of art beyond and above the 'issues' involved—these were the tenets of his aesthetic faith. The artist, in his view, should clarify and make exact those nebulous ideas thrown up by experience. His trade, like the priest's, was concerned with elucidation and communication, the formulation of order from chaos. (pp. 304-05)

His earlier writings, working within a humanist framework, described behaviour and asserted Catholic values by negative suggestion. But they seemed 'light' because they omitted 'the determining character' of the 'soul'. (He had described Scoop to his agents as 'light and excellent'.) They were [like the novels of Work Suspended's central character, John Plant], subtle exercises in literary technique in which technical felicity had become an end in itself. (p. 308)

Work Suspended was the first of Waugh's novels to use first person narration and, although various aspects of his personality and attitudes are distributed between John Plant and his father, it is largely autobiographical. In John we find the practical, workmanlike approach to fiction, the growing consciousness of the evils of contemporary society, the older man with the young woman and the spiritual exile with a mild distrust of his contemporaries. In the father we see the immediate abandonment of popular causes, the aesthetic tradition of representational, communicative art, the abomination of the standards of his youth, the rejection of Clive Bell and Bloomsbury, and an almost perverse delight in formality: the 'huge grim and solitary jest' (of his 'Academy' teas) at the expense of his friends and the contemporary artistic establishment. (p. 311)

The paperback text we have today, however, is the result of a 1949 revision, transforming the work from a very personal document into a more soberly topical allegory. Revision generally took the form of omission. But it was at this stage that the 'Postscript' was added to move the story forward to 1939. The original text [of the novel] dealt in detail with John Plant's literary technique, emphasizing his relish in 'Gothic enrichments' and 'the masked buttresses, false domes, superfluous columns, all the subterfuges of literary architecture and the plaster and gilt of its decoration'. (p. 312)

The alterations, though, are 'cosmetic'; while increasing the topical relevance and toning down the invective of the story Waugh changed nothing of its essence as an autobiographical document. In the original text the war is not even mentioned. The technical literary discussion was probably omitted on aesthetic grounds for it represented material which might have been interesting in a magazine article but which bore no structural relevance to the plot (a critical point frequently reiterated in his reviews). Perhaps more importantly, it revealed too much of himself. Both Plant's and Waugh's aesthetic relied on the concept of art as artifice; it should have 'absolutely nothing of [himself] in it'…. This was the paradox at the heart of his 'climacteric'—the problem of describing the subjective objectively.

The novel is not, then, simply a reaction to the war but a discussion of deep-rooted personal aesthetic problems which the revisions attempt to disguise and objectify. (p. 313)

In altering and ironically inverting the titles of the two parts Waugh drew greater attention to the central theme of decay and regeneration. The birth is the birth of the new age; what has died with the father can never be replaced by the son. In the first section Waugh speaks of 'the hide and seek with one's own personality' and the exposing of 'the bare minimum of ourselves' as a characteristic of modern 'civilized' man. The violation of privacy becomes a subtle leitmotif. A high price is set on 'Modesty' and it is this which is raped by Atwater and the seedy world of pre-war Britain. (p. 314)

Work Suspended is essentially an exposition of John Plant's 'climacteric' as a writer. There is no direct correspondence between Plant's and Waugh's novels other than their mutual delight in craftsmanship; no hint is given as to the outcome of Plant's problem—a metaphor, surely, for Waugh's own. Like Plant, he had no idea where it would end. His second marriage (1937) and the certain prospect of socialist government represented an assault on his private world, the first willingly embraced, the second, he considered, attempting to subvert his individuality. He only knew that he needed 'new worlds to conquer' and feared that he might mechanically be 'turning out year after year the kind of book [he knew he could] write well', 'becoming purely a technical expert'…. (pp. 314-15)

The 'sense of homelessness' becomes a companion theme to that of the invasion of privacy. Plant is driven to the seclusion of the countryside; he no longer belongs to the London of his youth. This was amplified by Waugh in later works where refugees, numberless hordes of anonymous individuals are herded from place to place. The condition of 'homelessness' he saw as symptomatic of a society which condemned private property and discouraged individualism. (p. 315)

Doubtless Waugh felt that the first edition did not make his point strongly enough when in the 1949 revision, with the hindsight of the war, he added the 'Postscript'. In this the theme of the 'petrified egg' is reinforced by the image of the beavers in a concrete pool, which, with futile efforts, damn 'the ancestral stream'. Traditional values, bulwarks against chaos (controls on the flood) are now without point. In his dedication to Alexander Woollcott Waugh remarked: '… even if I were again to have the leisure to finish it, the work would be vain, for the world in which and for which it was designed, has ceased to exist'. Plant's house is requisitioned, his father's house destroyed, Lucy lost forever. The novel, like Waugh's own, remains 'a heap of neglected foolscap at the back of a drawer'. (p. 318)

The discontinuation of the novel was symbolic. Its theme was, at least in part, an attempt to analyse why the civilized man's emotions must 'assume the livery of defence' before they can 'pass through the lines'. That shyness was now abandoned; an aggressive attitude was adopted after being so long submerged in an inability openly to wage war on the polite belief in the inevitability of 'progress'. The problem had been that there was no obvious enemy….

Ultimately, we can only guess at the real reasons for Waugh's inability to complete Work Suspended. His explanatory dedication to Woollcott represents only one aspect of the truth. But perhaps it was simply because he felt that he had failed to resolve the aesthetic problem of rendering the subjective objectively. 'Objectivity' in his post-war work relies on the assumption of a higher reality ultimately governing the action, where the 'determining character of the human soul' is 'that of being God's creature with a defined purpose'. No such dimension had been built into Work Suspended and Waugh may have decided that to continue his normal, externalised analysis of behaviour was meaningless; the negative assertion of order through an evocation of the sordid, chaotic and sentimental now seemed inadequate. He had effected the stylistic but not the thematic transformation. (p. 319)