[In the following essay, Blayac argues that as a metaphor for changing social conditions “Bella Fleace Gave a Party” ranks among Waugh's best works of short fiction.]

In his somewhat controversial biography of Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Sykes tentatively discards some of the writer's early novels as uneven and immature;¹ he is even more censorious of the short stories which, except for “Mr. Loveday's Little Outing” and “Period Piece,” he repeatedly finds fault with.² They are, he suggests, repetitive, impersonal, and occasionally marred by too close an imitation of well-known stories or writers. As a case in point, Mr. Sykes writes that “Bella Fleace Gave a Party”³ “is supposed to be based on an incident which did actually happen: an ambitious hostess, it was related, gave a party but the invitations were not posted. The legend or fact was very well known in those days and by 1936 had grown ‘something musty.’ Many readers must have known the end of the story from the beginning.”⁴ Mr. Sykes' summary, focussing on the trivial and the superficial, will hardly do justice to a short story whose essential meaning he fails to grasp. For us, Waugh used the largely drawn upon anecdote⁵ as a mere platform for the voicing of a serious and thoroughly consistent outlook on life. He wove it into a grim, ironic, archetypal satire not so much of Ireland and the Irish in themselves as of a modern world which has forsaken the glory and grandeur of its past. As such the short story assumes a new significance, for which Waugh's art certainly comes off the better, and “Bella Fleace” in the process comes to rank among the writer's most meaningful short works.

The simplicity of the structure underlines Waugh's intentions. Through an apparently objective description—reminiscent of the Blue Guide Style used in A Handful of Dust to introduce Hetton Abbey⁶—the reader is successively acquainted with Ballingar, “a typical Irish town,” Fleacetown, Bella's manor in “typical Irish country,” and the Fleaces themselves seen through historical perspective. This introduction provides the story with a coherent background of reference, arouses the reader's attention by gradually travelling towards a close-up on⁷ the house and family, and keeps his interest awake with a number of outside elements used as counterpoints to the main theme. In fact it strikes the “change and decay” note.

Ballingar, the typical Irish town, proves to be the very image of poverty and dereliction; Fleacetown, although “unusually habitable,” will barely “survive its owner;” the eponymous heroine is revealed to be the last descendant of a once-thriving family. Waugh evokes a favorite theme, Decadence and Death; in this respect the flashback on the Fleace story (providing the anecdote with a temporal background) is a clever stroke which exemplifies, both technically and ideologically, the ineluctable waning of house and family. This is traced from the heroic times when the Fleaces were a strong, warlike tribe living in a “stockaded fort” to the eighteenth-century splendor of an already “enervated” though “still wealthy and influential” family, and eventually the steady decline which, through “no heroic debauchery,”⁸ ended in the generation of eccentrics culminating—or tapering off—in Bella herself. The very mutilation of the latter's name from Miss Annabel Rochfort-Doyle-Fleace to plain Bella Fleace, and even Bella is one more token of the overwhelming corruption that submerges the world. Annabel—etymologically grace and beauty—is now Bella, an old woman over 80, lame in one leg—a witch in appearance.

At this stage, one must remark that Waugh is too much of an artist to state his theme in an overly simple manner. The degradation of property, family and last representative is made more dramatic by a number of variations and counterpoints which obliquely state the author's point of view: the mere juxtaposition of declining ancient values with rising modern fashions endows the episode with almost universal significance. The anecdote becomes the central archetype of Waugh's earlier fiction—that of the decline and fall of Man in these, our modern times.

Concurrently to the decadence of Fleacetown, other neighboring houses undergo resurrection of a sort. Electric light, central heating and a lift have been installed in “the rival Gordontown,” which, together with Mock House, Newhill, together with Castle Mockstock, is provided with “neatly raked gravel, bathrooms and dynamos.” Although these advantages are not to be dismissed lightly, the houses are now “the wonder and ridicule of the country.”⁹ The very names Waugh assigns them betoken his dissatisfaction with them. Newhill is probably the new fad of some gross upstart, Mock House and Castle Mockstock deride their very origins by the acceptance of modern conveniences. Thriving as they look, such edifices appear to repudiate tradition and the past from which they were issued; they have ceased to be Irish altogether, nay, have lost both function and identity. Mock House and Newhill, now leased to sporting Englishmen, are deserted most of the year; Castle Mockstock has been defiled by Lord Mockstock's marrying beneath him; Gordontown, bought by the American Lady Gordon, heralds the invasion of the island by the barbarians from the New Continent. Waugh, viewing architecture as the emblem and the touchstone of civilization, gloomily broods on the rise of change and modernism.

This overture points at Waugh as a committed writer. It proposes a riddle which the anecdote will solve, and announces a revelation. The arrival of Bella's only relative, a distant London cousin named Archie Banks,¹⁰ sets the plot going. The interest the young man manifests in the library rare books induces Bella to sell them. Rather than be “fleeced,” she chooses to spend the money from the sale on a Christmas party which is momentarily to restore the splendor of yore. She will muster the families of ancient, reliable lineage and reject the snobbish, uncultured social climbers. Unwonted activity stirs the house for a while, then, once the last details are completed, D-day comes. At 8 o'clock Bella limps downstairs to welcome her guests; at half past twelve nobody has come when Lady Mockstock, the draper's daughter, and Lady Gordon, the American, attempt gate crashing and are duly repelled. Bella, unable to bear the double shock, dies the next day. Later, Archie Banks arrives at Fleacetown to organize the funeral and set the house in order: “… sorting out her effects … [he finds] in her escritoire, stamped, addressed, but unposted, the invitations to the ball.”¹¹

This bare outline is inadequate to suggest the moral of a story which casts a crude light on the shortcomings of the age. Our times are devoid of humanity. The world of tradition and order is upside down as upstart hordes storm in while truly noble families pass out to be ironically taken over by “Banks.” Taste, good fellowship, candor are superseded by vulgarity, envy and dissimulation. Burke's Peerage is no longer to be trusted as American Gordons now pullulate. A strange world, and a sadly insane one!

It would be misleading, however, to think that Waugh extols the virtues of Bella while disparaging the modern barbarians. At no time in the short story is Bella presented as a civilizing influence, even less as a potential counterweight to the growing importance of those who mock lineage and style. On the contrary, far from being invested with the sacred role of Defender of the Past, Bella stands up as a caricature of nobleness and nobility—in the same way as Fleacetown never represents anything better than the more modern houses do. Indeed, the writer is most careful to “describe her [the heroine's] appearance closely …, because it [seems] in contradiction to much of her character. She was over eighty, very untidy and very red; steaky grey hair was twisted behind her head into a horsy bun, wisps hung around her cheeks; her nose was prominent and blue veined; her eyes pale blue, blank and mad. …”¹² Later he lays definite emphasis on her decrepitude: “… Bella herself was increasingly occupied with the prospect of death. In the winter before the one we are talking of, she had been extremely ill. She emerged in April, rosy cheeked as ever, but slower in her movements and mind.”¹³

Although it seems “in contradiction to much of her character,” Bella's appearance reflects her real nature. An old woman, with mad eyes and a slow mind, she never grasps the issues she should be fighting for. Here a comparison with Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay may help understand the inadequacies of Bella and of her house.

Contrarily to the model of St. Paul's cathedral which, with its grace and proportion, becomes an ideal that Huxley's misfits should strive to attain, Fleacetown can by no means be held as symbolic of civilized enlightenment. The humor of the description cannot blind the reader to the reality of its decrepitude. At best Fleacetown can be seen as the sorely degraded, half-ruined image of the homely, comfortable hall of the eighteenth century.

In contrast to Gumbril Sr. who keeps in touch with mankind and has reached wisdom and insight, Bella remains isolated, foolish and blind to reality. Most of her contemporaries have already departed this world, or are about to do so.¹⁴ Bella's fight, if considered as a crusade against the infidels, can at best be a singlehanded, rearguard skirmish which stands little chance of stemming the tidal wave of barbarism. After her, nothing will remain of the past.

Besides, Bella is never made to display—let alone embody—any redemptive quality. Whereas Gumbril Sr. consistently demonstrates his liberal humanism, Bella always bases her action on egotistic misconceptions. In order to thwart her cousin Archie Banks' so-called schemes, she does away with the treasures of the Hall Library. She barters books for money, squanders it on a meaningless party, and demeans herself to lower levels than the moderns she combats. The reader realizes that the taint of modernism has touched her to such an extent that she chooses the least meaningful ceremony to revive the past. Or rather, ironically, she selects the right ceremony for the wrong motive, thus depriving it of its essentially positive value. In the party Bella only sees the garish and the tawdry. She warps its meaning for she never senses the humanism that used to pervade such gatherings in Fielding and Addison's times. Her re-decoration of Fleacetown is patchy and of little durable worth; the party is essentially intended as a bolstering up of her sick, reeling mind. In the same way that she dissipates the heritage of the past by selling the books, she misunderstands it by organizing a party to debase her hated neighbors. No doubt that, by doing so, she believes she emulates Sir Roger de Coverley, Squire Allworthy and their likes, when in fact she betrays their philosophy. Then the squire would entertain the village community at the Hall, giving everybody from top to bottom of the social ladder a feeling of community. The reunions, the merrymaking tightened the ties, uniting an already close-knit social group.

Bella utterly misunderstands the inner significance of such functions. She even distorts it to such a point as to endow it with the opposite meaning. Far from trying to unite the county community, she endeavors to disrupt it. Bella cuts, carves, destroys; therefore, the conclusion definitely introduces an idea of retributive justice into the anecdote. Bella is chastised for having sinned against the Spirit of the Past. What's more, by appointing Christmas as the time of revenge, she proves as sacrilegious as Adam and Nina were in Vile Bodies two years before. Bella's death comes as a timely, justified punishment. The notion of fate, so important in Waugh's early works—and already suggested here by the ironic demise of Bella's brother—is made again to intervene in order to show that tampering with morals and tradition is a crime that the gods severely punish.

For all these reasons, “Bella Fleace Gave a Party,” far from being the simple imitation of a well-known story, is a terse but forcible statement of Evelyn Waugh's personal philosophy. It illustrates the writer's obsessive fear that all sanity and values have been suppressed from our world. The Roman Catholic novelist warns his readers that, in the Waste Land, nothing can save Man from his Fall. The choice is not between Bella and the others, but outside them all, indeed perhaps in isolation, confinement and the self. Whatever one may think of the shortcomings of such a philosophy, “Bella Fleace Gave a Party” expresses it perfectly. The short story, seen in this light, remains not only an essential link between Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust, but also an archetypal illustration of Evelyn Waugh's embittered human and religious stances.

Notes

1. Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh: a Biography (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1975).

2. Evelyn Waugh, Mr. Loveday's Little Outing and Other Sad Stories (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1936).

3. Ibid., pp. 185–204.

4. Sykes, p. 164.

5. Oscar Wilde's “Aunt Jane” plays on the same theme.

6. Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (London: Chapman and Hall, 1934), p. 27. “Bella Fleace Gave a Party” is the first instance of this style, which Waugh was to use so often in his later fiction.

7. Such technical terms remind us that Waugh, although often disgusted with the “7th Art,” was always attracted by it; he even was a cinema critic for The Isis in his student days at Oxford.

8. p. 190.

9. p. 189.

10. Etymologically, “Noble Banks” or “Rule of the Banks.”

11. p. 203.

12. p. 191.

13. p. 192.

14. Ibid., pp. 197–98. “Many of those whose names were transcribed were dead or bedridden; some whom she just remembered seeing as small children were reaching retiring age in remote corners of the globe; many of the houses she wrote down were blackened shells, burnt during the troubles and never rebuilt.”