[In the following excerpt, Stopp discusses Scott-King's Modern Europe and Love Among the Ruins, which he finds to be sad but humorous, and lacking in brutality or sentimentalism.]

Scott-King's Modern Europe is a sad little story, finely wrought and economical in its effects, but sad. Superficially it owed its origin to a visit to Spain, where Mr Waugh joined in the celebrations in the summer of 1945 for the tercentenary of Vittoria, at Salamanca, and had his first experience of the machinery of official hospitality in the post-war world. But it contains his first reflections on the wider scene of mid-twentieth century Europe. Even without the footnote that ‘The Republic of Neutralia is imaginary and composite and represents no existing state’, we should recognize overtones of Jugoslavia and the Dalmatian coast, and the wider echoes of decay in European historical values everywhere. Combined with this is the radical uncertainty whether anything positive can ultimately have been achieved by a war which, appearing first through the medium of common-room wirelesses under a heroic and chivalrous disguise, became later ‘a sweaty tug-of-war between teams of indistinguishable louts’. Uncertainty of the achievement, certainty of the losses incurred, these are the sad strains of the music which is here played.

The musician selected to perform is himself the reverse of distinguished. After failing to achieve a College Fellowship Scott-King has been classical master at Granchester for twenty-one years; Paul Pennyfeather, if he had stayed at Llanabba, would have been his contemporary. He has become a school institution, lamenting in a slightly nasal voice over modern decadence, and rejoicing in his reduced station through the defection of classical specialists to the Modern Side, fascinated by obscurity and failure, his own first and foremost. And his strange adventures during that summer of 1946 strike a note of dimness all along the line. Neutralia, through remaining out of the second World War physically, as did Scott-King spiritually, ‘became remote, unconsidered, dim’. Dim also was Whitemaid, his sole English academic counterpart at the celebrations at Bellacita. Care and the fear of failure dogged and finally overcame Arturo Fe, Doctor of Bellacita University and official in the Ministry of Rest and Culture, Bogdan Antonic, the International Secretary, ‘whose face was lined with settled distress and weariness’, and Garcia the Engineer. Even with Lockwood, a former prize pupil and Scott-King's rescuer from No. 64 Jewish Illegal Immigrants Camp, the same mournful note is struck. ‘Sad case, he was a sitter for the Balliol scholarship. Then he had to go into the army.’

But all these scattered notes of failure, of promise run to seed, of high hopes dashed, are gathered together in the name of Bellorius, ‘The Last Latinist’, the poet whose 1,500 lines of tedious Latin hexameters gained for him from an ungrateful Hapsburg nothing more than the cancellation of his court pension. Bellorius died poor and in some discredit in 1646; he is the patron-saint of dimness in this work, and it is this ‘blood-brotherhood in dimness’ which first drew Scott-King to study his work. The new-old and degenerate state of Neutralia could not have made a better choice when it put its first International Secretary on to searching the records for some suitable anniversary to commemorate, some occasion out of which to make political capital. And what irony in the subject to which this unknown early Neutralian humanist chose to devote his Latinity: ‘a visit to an imaginary island of the New World where in primitive simplicity, untainted by tyranny or dogma, there subsisted a virtuous, chaste and reasonable community.’ Such was the humanist dream which held Scott-King enthralled for fifteen years. The temptation represented by the engraved and embossed card on his breakfast table fell on fruitful soil in a man who for years had been secretly wedded to the warm Southern seas—‘all that travel agent ever sought to put in a folder, fumed in Scott-King's mind that drab morning’—and he went. The awakening could hardly have been ruder.

It was a world of unreason into which he thus stepped, with the one fundamental nightmare characteristic of unreason: nothing is as it seems, all is facade, covering an ugly reality. The air stewardess seems an amalgam of midwife, governess, and shopwalker; Miss Bombaum might be an actress or harlot or lady-novelist, but is in fact a topliner in modern journalism; Arturo Fe might be a slightly ageing film-actor, but is scholar, lawyer, and civil servant. The Hotel 22nd March, known through its political past under a score of aliases, but always referred to as the Ritz; the National Memorial at Simona, which turns out to commemorate a piece of political thuggery; Bellorius himself, confused by Miss Bombaum with the totally different Byzantine General Belisaurus, and finally commemorated by an appalling statue commissioned years before by a fraudulent commercial magnate, representing no one, show that even institutions have but an uncertain hold on reality and stability. It is perhaps but a belated recognition of the power of the genius loci when Scott-King departs by the ‘underground railway’ as an Ursuline nun, and arrives in Palestine as an illegal Jewish immigrant. All appearances are deceptive in this modern masquerade—a stage-set indeed, but an ominous one.

Appearances are deceptive since in this constant process of scene-shifting which calls itself modern European history the features of the new dispensation are constantly becoming apparent beneath the fading outlines of the old; and in this general dissolution the new is ugly and brash and the dispossessed old is tired and uncomprehending: too wise to be chagrined, too cultured to protest. Those few remaining Neutralian aristocrats, descendants of the Crusaders and Knights of Malta, who haunt the Ritz like lingering shades, gazing with ‘inky, simian eyes’ at that portent of the new Europe, the statuesque Miss Sveningen, are blood-brothers of the Arabs of East Africa whom Mr. Waugh met in the clubs of the seaboard towns; dispossessed by protectorates in Somalia, Aden, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar (Black Mischief, Remote People), and by more ruthless methods of penetration in Harar (Waugh in Abyssinia).

It is to this aristocracy of the dispossessed that Scott-King finally and defiantly commits himself in his last words to the headmaster: ‘“I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world. … I think it is the most long-sighted view that it is possible to take.”’ Long-sighted, since Scott-King has finally seen the fallacy of moving with the times: taking up economic history because of the decrease in classical specialists. For change, like revolution, has the saturnine propensity of eating its own children. The more international politics become, the more men reach across the barriers of communities to link up with their ideological brethren, the more of their fellow-men find themselves displaced, dispossessed, outcast. ‘“It is extraordinary how many people without the requisite facilities seem anxious to cross frontiers today.”’ Thus the Neutralian Major of Police, who significantly doubles his official functions with running the underground escaping organization. ‘“That is where my position in the police is a help. … I also have a valued connexion with the Neutralian government. Troublesome fellows whom they want to disappear pass through my hands in large numbers.”’ The machinery of the modern state is Janus-headed, facing both ways, creating both tyranny and graft, ‘supporting a vast ill-paid bureaucracy whose work is tempered and humanized by corruption’. Miss Bombaum was more right than she knew when, quoting from one of her recent articles, she described the underground as ‘an alternative map of Europe … the new world taking shape beneath the surface of the old … the new ultra-national citizenship’. And the new world is the caricature of the old. The ‘Republic’ of Neutralia is itself a travesty of that more ancient form of state which reaches back to the Greek polis. The Underground, the symbol of the new fraternity of the displaced person, as it takes shape below the surface of old citizenships, is appropriately enough expressed in the symbols of the French Revolution. At the little seaport of Santa Maria, itself a palimpsest of Mediterranean history, from Athenian colony to Napoleonic conquest, there lies on the cobbled water-front a large warehouse, now Underground dispersal centre, a birthplace of the new ultra-national citizenship. Here, ensconced in a bed by the door, whose coverlet was littered with food, weapons, and tobacco, lay the female guardian, sometimes making lace like a tricoteuse of the Terror, while her husband, as supervising officer, made a brief appearance at the door in the hour before dawn, and called the roll of those who were to be ‘despatched’ on that day.

This was Scott-King's last visual impression of modern Europe when he embarked on the final stage of his adventure—that sea-journey in the battened-down hold of a ship over whose horrors the narrator draws a veil, and from which he emerges, first fully conscious, ‘sitting stark naked while a man in khaki drill taps his knee with a ruler’. And at this point a memory from an earlier work of Waugh comes back, a parallel to this total loss of personality insistently demands entry to the mind. Is not the spiritual odyssey of Scott-King which takes him from Granchester to Granchester via Bellacita, the Underground and a Palestinian camp, this escape from the innocence of academic life into the seaminess of modern existence, and a return incognito across the waters—is not this all strangely reminiscent of the progress of Paul Pennyfeather from Scone to Scone via Lanabba, King's Thursday, the Latin-American Entertainment Co. Ltd (another underground railway), and Blackstone Gaol? And if this is so, has nothing been achieved in the twenty-one years in which Scott-King has dreamed his dream of the Mediterranean? Paul, when restored to Scone and reflecting how right the Church had been to put down early Christian heresy, has at least laid the ghost of religious doubt. What ghost has been laid by Scott-King's excursion into the world of unreason? Can it be Bellorius? In the staff-room on his return to Granchester he admits:

“To tell you the truth I feel a little désoeuvré. I must look for a new subject.”

“You've come to the end of old Bellorius at last?”

“Quite to the end.”

But why, we may ask, must Bellorius go? Or rather why, in the years which lie ahead of Scott-King, may we be certain that no other Bellorius will absorb his devoted powers? Had there been still some mark of imperfection, one small blemish on the otherwise perfectly dim mental outlook of Scott-King? Even this suggestion seems strange in a man so abstracted from the realities of the moment as Scott-King, who finished the work of translating Bellorius's Latin hexameters into Spenserian stanzas ‘at the time of the Normandy landings’, and who composed his threnody on ‘The Last Latinist’ at the time of the peace celebrations; or for a man who ‘positively rejoiced in his reduced station’. Far from harbouring a baffled sense of having missed all the compensations of life, he was definitely blasé; and a passage of concealed quotation from Pater's famous description of La Gioconda gives him, in this freedom of the mind, the mysterious agelessness of one who was ‘jaded with accumulated experience of his imagination’. And his description of himself as ‘an adult, an intellectual, a classical scholar, almost a poet’, becomes his leitmotif in the undignified situations into which he is plunged.

And yet, when the story opens, Scott-King is still one small, one minute stage removed from genuine detachment: though superficially content with, nay fascinated by his reduced station, he compensates with the life of the dreamer. After years of labour on his translation, his opus, his ‘monument to dimness’, the shade of Bellorius still stood at his elbow demanding placation—that shade which was perhaps the temptation to glory in the distinction of being ‘The Last Latinist’, to create a mental Utopia in the form of an imaginary island governed by reason and free from tyranny and dogma, the temptation to escape and to dramatize the conditions of escape, to invert the pattern of one's own dimness by erecting a model to dimness elsewhere. So, to discharge his last obligation to Bellorius, Scott-King distilled his learning, wrote his last little essay and thereby gave a hostage to the outside world of noisy Neutralians—and the embossed and engraved invitation on the breakfast-table was the sign that the challenge had been accepted. There he was to learn the total irrelevance of the mental landscape of his mind to the modern age, to be finally disabused of the expectation of ever finding a ‘virtuous, chaste and reasonable community’, be these qualities never so diluted.

More than that, the man who has raised one monument to Bellorius is brought to make a speech before another monument, and, having done so, and the cord having released the enveloping cloth, is confronted with a likeness, in the eyes of the world, of his hero: ‘It was not Bellorius … ; it was not even unambiguously male; it was scarcely human.’ That unveiling was the last lesson which Scott-King has to learn, to be reconciled finally to his own dimness, and to the dimness, seen in the light of the world, of the subject and outlook which he represents. In the state of mind in which he returns, even the erection of monuments to a forgotten world is a senseless gesture, even the consciousness of being ‘an adult, an intellectual’ is excessive, even to be blasé is hybris. The only thing is to accept one's own obscurity, to be content to administer a wasting patrimony, without even the consolation of being a martyr, an outpost, a forlorn cause. The intellectual and classical scholar was, in the academic life, as was Bellorius at the court of the Hapsburgs, a pensioner of such figures of the new order as Griggs, the civics master, dilating on the sufferings of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Now even the pension has been cancelled, and no voice will be raised to extol the humanist and regret his passing. A sad story—delicately wrought, but still sad. …

In a lecture given in 1953, Professor Romano Guardini commented on the loss by modern man of the primeval images of human existence: the road, the spring of water, the flame of fire. The road was no longer a thing to be walked, stumbled, toiled along, an image of man's earthly way, but the geometrically shortest route between map reference A and B; flowing water was no longer a reminder of time, an occasion of reflection on the whence and the whither of human life, but a jet of liquid from a tap; fire was no longer both comfort and retribution, the living, leaping flame of inspiration, but a tamed demon in a lighter, flicked on, flicked off, to accompany the inevitable cigarette.

In the last sentence of Love Among the Ruins, written during work on the Crouchback novels to provide an hour's amusement for the still civilized, Mr Waugh strikes just this same note: ‘Miles felt ill at ease during the ceremony and fidgeted with something small and hard which he found in his pocket. It proved to be his cigarette-lighter, a most uncertain apparatus. He pressed the catch and instantly, surprisingly, there burst out a tiny flame—gemlike, hymeneal, auspicious.’

Hymeneal, auspicious? An augury for the success of his nuptials with the State-provided Miss Flower? Or a comforting reminder that there was always a way out? Did he feel that ‘something small and hard’ with the comfort of a groom fingering the ring in his waistcoat pocket, or of a cornered criminal fingering his knuckle-duster? Probably the latter. Faced with the hideous mess the State had made of his lover's, Clara's face, he had walked out at random and anguished, and arrived at Mountjoy Castle, the scene of his imperfect rehabilitation by a beneficent if not beneficial State policy. ‘He knew what he wanted. He carried in his pocket a cigarette lighter which often worked. It worked for him now. …’ After the great holocaust, his mind was calm and empty. ‘The scorched earth policy had succeeded. He had made a desert in his imagination which he might call peace … the enchantments that surrounded Clara were one with the splendours of Mountjoy.’ All the paraphernalia of the State, the Ministers of Rest, Culture and Welfare, the Mountjoys Old and New, the Dome of Security, and Service of Euthanasia, the Method of Reform, Remedial Repose and Rehabilitation, even the Result, Miles Plastic, as shown to the world, are one and all no more than stage properties of this Grand Guignol of the future. The genuine symbol, the touch of mania in the whole scene, that rich glint of lunacy in the eye which distinguished Aimée from her fellow receptionists, the note of a primeval urge distorted and diverted from its proper channel, is seen in that small and hard object which enables man to burn his past without however being able to rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes. No liberating action, this, as when Dennis Barlow burnt his immediate past in the furnaces of the pet's cemetery, no sloughing off of a young heart before returning enriched to the roots of one's culture. Miles, the Modern Man, is the conditioned personality who recognizes his own image when confronted with a simple, rough packing case, model of the new Mountjoy Castle to rise on the ruins of the old. For him, there is no ticket back home; the gutted prison and the rehabilitated prisoner means no more than the destruction of a richer past for the benefit of a poorer future; the Revolution, as in Scott-King, eats its own children. The Common Man is an inverted myth, a counter-Prometheus, not one who steals fire from the Gods, but one who fondles a small hard presence in his pocket as a guarantee of the power of unlimited destruction.

The story is a ‘romance’ of the not so distant future. Mr Waugh is pleased to imagine, for our entertainment, the condition of a State-made desert in which the boredom of prison is the general condition of society, and a certain tranquil melancholy, conducive to some degree of culture and individuality, is only to be found in prison. Social life in the Welfare State is a fate worse than death, the Euthanasia Centre—a kind of Whispering Glades in reverse—the most popular service. Short of Euthanasia, residence in places like Mountjoy Castle under a new Penology, whose fundamental principle is that ‘no man could be held responsible for the consequences of his own acts’, is the most desirable thing.

Here lies a rich quarry of material for flashes of paradoxical humour: the law-court, which all but acquits Miles for incendiarism, and all but commits the bystanders, bereaved relatives of the airmen he has incinerated, for contempt of court; the Euthanasia Service, slack when a strike or anything of human interest is afoot, but normally so popular that foreigners with one-way tickets are turned back at Channel ports; the infinite advantages of being an Orphan rather than the product of a Full Family Life; and the minor diverting possibilities of the State newspeak—State be with you, State help me. The new Penology descends ultimately from Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery, Governor of Blackstone Gaol, as the old lags of Mountjoy, Sweat and Soapy, with their melancholy regret that ‘there's no security in crime these days’, echo the sturdy individualism of the aged burglar at Egdon Heath, who urged Paul to stand up for his rights when given caviar for cold bacon.

The planned dilapidation of Satellite City and of its main permanent State building, the Dome of Security, is the contemporary note: an ironic comment on communal lack of enterprise by one who saw only too keenly the shadow side of the panem et circenses provided by the 1951 Festival buildings, and by their most prominent feature, the Dome of Discovery. The Dome of Security itself is an epitome of the whole self-defeating nature of social security schemes in this story: ‘The eponymous dome had looked well enough in the architect's model’—say, for instance, the Beveridge Report—‘shallow certainly but amply making up in girth what it lacked in height. … But to the surprise of all, when the building arose and was seen from the ground, the dome blandly vanished’. Security for all is planned, but blandly evades the planners, just as ‘great sheets of glass planned to “trap” the sun, admitted a few gleams from scratches in their coat of tar’. A prime urge of the human race vanishes into thin air at the touch of a blueprint; the sun cannot be trapped, and fire is reduced to the incendiary possibilities of a cigarette-lighter.

The pointlessness of the plan at large is paralleled by the desultory progress of Miles Plastic's last, melancholy attempt to achieve love among the ruins; his affair with Clara, on whom two State-enforced operations end by foisting a facial mask as unnatural and obscene as the smirking travesty of a face given to Frank Hinsley at Whispering Glades; and his final resort to the last ecstasy of wholesale conflagration. And it is in a desultory and whimsical manner that Mr. Waugh has chosen to point his reflections on the decline of our culture by the allusive employment of fragments from three artists of a banished age: Tennyson, Browning, and the neo-classical sculptor Canova. Tennyson's ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white’, and ‘Come into the garden, Maud’, provide the setting and the concealed quotations for that ‘rich, old-fashioned Tennysonian night’ at Mountjoy Castle, which is Miles's last night in Arcadia before an inscrutable State decrees his rehabilitation and thrusts him out into the world for which he has been conditioned. Browning's poem ‘Love among the Ruins’ takes over the setting: ‘the site once of a city great and gay’, treeless slopes where once

… the domed and daring palace shot its spires
Up like fires …

Here there remains of past glory but a single turret, but the poet knows

That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
Waits me there …

as Clara waits for Miles in her cubicle in a Nissen hut, filled with the bric-a-brac of a vanished civilization. And Henry Moses's reproductions of Canova's marbles—so reminiscent, in its 1876 binding, of the Victorian drawing-room with perhaps a Venus de Milo in the corner—provides the starting point for the illustrations. By means of a homely paste book technique which must have given Mr. Waugh much innocent amusement, he constructed the figures for the ironic juxtapositions of life in the Greek Polis and in Satellite City: the drawings ‘Exiles from Welfare’, ‘Experimental Surgery’, and others, bearing such inscriptions as ‘Canova fec., Moses delin., Waugh perfec.’

To Tennyson's mysterious Maud and to Browning's girl with the yellow hair, to Canova's groups of Cupid and Psyche and of the Three Graces, Mr. Waugh has added one further, delightful fancy, that ‘long, silken, corn-gold beard’, which was the only feature that broke the canon of pure beauty in Clara's face when Miles first beheld it, complemented as it was by the voice, with its ‘deep, sweet tone, all unlike the flat, conventional accent of the age’. But for Miles, this crowning feature, whether seen in the clear light of Satellite day, or ‘silvered like a patriarch's in the midnight radiance’ of another Tennysonian night, is the canon of beauty. ‘“On such a night as this,” said Miles, supine, gazing into the face of the moon’—and echoing all unknowingly the Merchant of Venice—‘“on such a night as this I burnt an Air Force station and half its occupants.”’ That was the only moment of ecstasy he had then known. The beard brought, for Miles, the dawning of the proscribed emotion of love, ‘a word seldom used by politicians and by them only in moments of pure fatuity’, which singles out two persons from the herd and gives them an indelible, rubber-stamp obliterating impress. But what State has given, as an unexpected result of the Jungmann operation, State may take away. The removal of the beard by experimental surgery, and its replacement by a synthetic rubber skin, ‘a tight, slippery mask, salmon pink’, is the end. Miles retches unobtrusively, walks off and burns down Mountjoy; revolt is exorcized in a moment of ecstasy. ‘… his brief adult life lay in ashes; the enchantments that surrounded Clara were one with the splendours of Mountjoy; her great golden beard, one with the tongues of flame that had leaped and expired among the stars. …’

The theme of the lovers brought together, and parted, the one disfigured by act of State, is common to this work and to George Orwell's 1984. But here we must at least say, thank State for the beard; for it is that which discharges harmlessly, like a lightning conductor, the more sultry implications of this sad little love story. Orwell develops the theme with the full attendant resources of brutality which seem now inevitable in any sombre view of the future. Mr. Waugh's short story never loses its astringent humour and freedom from sentiment. Both qualities are guaranteed, not only by his own style and outlook, but also, in this particular case, by the beard.