SOURCE: “Decline and Fall,” in The Ironic World of Evelyn Waugh: A Study of Eight Novels, Northern Illinois University Press, 1992, pp. 32–51.

[In the following essay, Beaty analyzes the ironic tone of Decline and Fall.]

For Decline and Fall, in manuscript subtitled “The Making of an Englishman,” Waugh invents a complex of shocking disparities through which to demonstrate the reeducation of his central character, Paul Pennyfeather, whose initial beliefs about the world are shattered by his experiential discoveries of its actual nature. The series of riotous picaresque adventures that strip away Paul's illusions about honor, love, society, education, the church, the law, the prison system, and even human nature detail his fall from blissful naiveté to a painful awareness of evil. Although exposure to the chaos of modern life forces him to question the behavioral codes of his stable, upper middle-class background—precepts which he confidently assumed to be adequate and appropriate for coping with any difficulties—the conflict between idealism and disillusionment is never wholly resolved. Ultimately he comes to realize that since neither approach offers the complete truth about life each must, as in Hegelian dialectics, be used to temper the other. The novel as a whole may therefore be viewed as an ironic parody of the Bildungsroman—one which, neither debasing the genre nor treating it seriously, merely plays with it in unexpected ways.¹

Contributing much to the success of irony in Decline and Fall is the positioning of a detached narrator between author and central character. The novel's apparent cynicism toward suffering and death is therefore not necessarily the sentiment of the author, who has distanced himself from the work, but rather of an indifferent storyteller who represents the usual callousness of humanity. The disinterested pose of the narrator serves negatively, however, to stimulate the increased emotional involvement of the reader, who might consider obtrusive condemnation of evil as preachy or, especially in this fallen world, where innocence is often equated with stupidity, might regard overt sympathy with the victim as sentimental.

The narrator's disengagement also permits him, in the Belgravia interlude, to add an unusual dimension as he steps back from his story to comment interpretively on his own art, temporarily breaking the artistic illusion in a way typical of romantic irony.² This brief digression, strategically placed midway in the novel to show how incomplete Paul's education still is, allows the narrator to play ironically with both the central character and the reader about the nature of reality.³ For a few hours Paul emerges from the disjointed world into which ill circumstances have thrust him to reenter a civilized milieu where he believes a gentleman can feel at home, although the betrayals he has suffered in Oxford and West End London would seem to belie his trust in such an environment. His conviction that he is once again a solid person in a solid world is also contrasted ironically with his fading memory of recent misadventures amid the “sham” of Llanabba as if they were only “nightmares.” But the narrator, while confirming the dichotomy of Paul's two worlds, offers no clear resolution of which is reality and which is illusion. He merely explains that he is obliged to return Paul to the shadowy subworld, where the extraordinary adventures which are “the only interest about him” will be resumed.⁴ Implying that a passive character like Paul is incapable of the heroism expected by readers of 1920s thrillers, the narrator comments that the “book is really an account of the mysterious disappearance of Paul Pennyfeather, so that readers must not complain if the shadow which took his name does not amply fill the important part of hero for which he was originally cast” (163).

In presenting the circumstances that lead eventually to Paul's “disappearance,” the narrator, whose customary stance is almost complete objectivity, can indicate the confusion in Paul's life merely by detailing the physical objects in a certain environment as clues to the actions and characters associated with it. In such cases, metonymy functions ironically by indirectly conveying ideas about people and places without ever stating them. Although Waugh had toyed with this technique in “The Balance” by hinting information about Adam's friends through the contents of their rooms, he developed it fully for the first time in Decline and Fall. The particulars of Silenus's Bauhaus renovations at King's Thursday suggest the architect's own sterile, mechanically oriented mind. The description of Margot's “Sports Room” in her London home proclaims the kind of jobs being offered to the “young ladies” whom she interviews there: the lights are in testicular glass balls; the furniture is “ingeniously” constructed of phallic bats, polo sticks, and golf clubs; and a wall is decorated with the painting of a prize ram, presumably a symbol of male potency. The masters' common room at Llanabba, which Paul surveys apprehensively upon first encounter, provides him as well as the reader, through its material jumble, with a foretaste of the school's zany teaching staff. Scattered about in defiance of order are pipes, academic gowns, “golf clubs, a walking stick, an umbrella and two miniature rifles … a typewriter … a bicycle pump, two armchairs, a straight chair, half a bottle of invalid port, a boxing glove, a bowler hat, yesterday's Daily News, and a packet of pipe cleaners” (19–20).

Lack of cohesion also exists in social relations. Paul, an orphan, has no real family, and his uncaring guardian exploits him and his inheritance whenever possible. In the Fagan and Trumpington families the generations show little understanding of each other, and the elder Circumferences seem to have no genuine love for their son. Marriage becomes just another contractual business to Margot Beste-Chetwynde, Maltravers, Silenus, and Grimes, while the many instances of casual sex provide no lasting connection. The relations between instructors and students, at both Llanabba and Oxford, are a burlesque of the ideal, for each group takes advantage of the other. Paul's best friend, Potts, betrays their friendship, and Philbrick's tales suggest that there can be no trust between any men. Members of the upper class—the Circumferences, Peter Pastmaster, and the parvenu Maltravers—ignore their traditional obligations of leadership in favor of self-interest. Members of the Bollinger Club, in their destruction of items symbolizing music, art, and poetry, prove themselves not just indifferent but hostile to culture. From the perspective of the ironic narrator, all this indicates a civilization that has lost its bearing—one in which traditional bonds no longer hold it together. Hence Silenus's analogy of a turning carnival wheel is an apt symbol of frenzied circular motion with only centrifugal force and no advancement. As Yeats put it, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”⁵

Even Scone College—that Oxonian Eden from which Paul is banished and to which he returns only in reincarnation—is itself part of the fallen world. Yet until its evil is thrust upon him, he is as oblivious as was the youthful Waugh, who reminisced in his autobiography about an Oxford that seemed “a Kingdom of Cokayne,” where he “was reborn in full youth” after a cocoonlike development in a public school.⁶ Blind to the perils that surround him, Paul is rudely shaken out of his chrysalis existence and then borne along on a stream of events that, at every turn, frustrate his hopes and desires. Naively assuming that external appearances are the indications of ultimate validity, he discovers to his repeated sorrow that people are not what they seem. Inexperienced and highly vulnerable, he becomes the victim of many schemes and situations in a world ruled not by justice or reason but by capricious fortune.

Paul's true education begins with the opening episode at Scone. This fast-moving sequence of events, seen from several perspectives, serves as catalyst for all subsequent action and, as a particularly successful display of ironic artistry, merits detailed analysis. Even the names of the characters seem unsuitable. “Pennyfeather” symbolizes an insignificance at odds with the main character's central position. “Sniggs” and “Postlethwaite,” by their ludicrously undignified sounds, hint at the fraudulent nature of these college dons, while the uncommonly pretentious names of Bollinger members (Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington and Lumsden of Strathdrummond) imply a boastfulness not in keeping with true aristocrats. Other touches of irony intrude through inappropriate words, phrases, or tones. “Lovely” is the narrator's term to describe both the depredations of the Bollinger Club and the subsequent meeting of college officials to assess punishment. The hyperbolic “What an evening that had been!” (1) characterizes destruction during the Club's previous reunion. When the drunken Lumsden encounters Paul, the laird's primitive instincts are implied in an analogy likening him to “a druidical rocking stone” (5). Another irony pivots upon the mention of “outrage,” which the college dons fear may occur if they interfere with the Bollinger attack on Paul, whereas an outrage of a different sort does occur because they do nothing. When Paul is described as one who “does the College no good” (7), the ostensible reference to academic reputation cloaks an actual allusion to financial gain. The chaplain's enigmatic suggestion that the “ideals” Paul has “learned at Scone” may be of use in the business world is subject to several interpretations. It may insinuate that someone like Paul, whose values seem to be less than ideal, should do well in a profession not noted for idealism. It may imply that what Paul has recently learned in college about human behavior is contrary to what a university ought to teach. Or it may indicate the naiveté of a chaplain mouthing his usual, but in this case highly inappropriate, platitudes to a departing student.

The action of the Scone episode also abounds in contradiction, some of which cuts in more than one direction. The willful and extensive damage to several college rooms during the Bollinger Club's rampage, for which its members are assessed relatively low fines, contrasts with the damage noticed in Paul's room—two slight, certainly unintentional, cigarette burns, for which the bursar assesses comparatively high charges. These minor burns, in turn, contrast with the colossal injury done to Paul himself by that same bursar, who witnessed yet did not interfere with Paul's debagging; and the moderate fining of the Bollinger members, compared with Paul's expulsion for something of which he was completely innocent, represents a further miscarriage of justice. In the realm of cause and effect, substantial losses to the unpopular students—china, a piano, a Matisse painting, and a manuscript—result in only minimal benefit to the dons of some Founder's port. Conversely, the seemingly insignificant mistaking of Paul's tie, the stripes of which differed only by a quarter of an inch in width from those of the Boller tie, sets off a chain of disastrous occurrences that result in the complete obliteration of Paul's identity.

Underlying and controlling these sharply contrasting events at Scone are broader incongruities of perspective; and the hilarity of the episode derives largely from the clash between the distinctive attitudes of Paul Pennyfeather, the college authorities, and the Bollinger members about Paul's inadvertent fall from innocence. The wielders of academic power—the bursar, the junior dean, the master, and the chaplain—think and behave, in view of their obligations, contrary to what the reader and Paul would expect. Even the porter, by assuming Paul's guilt, echoes their demoralizing point of view. The dons who gleefully watch the Bollinger mayhem from a darkened window, without any intention of halting it, dwell upon their own potential benefit from the anticipated fines—the more horrendous the destruction, the greater the gain. Hence Sniggs can utter, according to his own logic, the illogical prayer, “Oh, please God, make them attack the Chapel” (3). A hypocritical conscience besets them momentarily when they think a titled student has run afoul of the Bollinger members but evaporates when they realize that the victim is only Pennyfeather, “some one of no importance” (6). The same double standard is exhibited by the master, who decides to expel Paul ostensibly for running through the quad “without his trousers” but actually because he is not wealthy enough to profit the college through substantial fines. In a burlesque of sweetness and sympathy, the chaplain bids Paul look on the bright side of his disgrace—that he has discovered so early his “unfitness for the priesthood” (8). But the porter's juxtaposed observation—that most students who are “sent down for indecent behaviour” (8) become schoolmasters—implies Paul's suitability for a profession usually thought to abide by principles as high as those of the clergy.

Members of the Bollinger Club, far from living up to their aristocratic titles, prove themselves to be barbarians. Their overweening sense of self-importance is skillfully undermined in the opening passages describing the gathering of old members for the annual “beano.” Through repeated wrenching of tone involving overstatement deflated by pejorative adjectives or demeaning nouns, the narrator alerts the reader to the discrepancy between their social status and their true character: “Epileptic royalty from their villas of exile; uncouth peers from crumbling country seats; … illiterate lairds from wet granite hovels in the Highlands” (1-2). Their behavior at reunions suggests their belief that they are above the gentlemanly code, just as Lady Circumference's defiance of grammar implies her assumption that she is not bound by conventional rules. Liberated by alcohol, the Bollinger members give vent to their atavistic hunting instincts, perpetuated, long after being essential for survival, in the ritualistic sport of county families. Their quarry may be a caged fox, which they pelt to death with champagne bottles, or unpopular students, whose prized possessions they destroy. To indicate the bestiality of their reversion to habits of primitive ancestors, the narrator employs animal analogies—“confused roaring” (1) and “baying for broken glass” (2). The absurdity of their pretensions is further exposed when the oafish Lumsden, whose dubious distinction stems from wild chieftain forebears, becomes incensed at Paul for wearing what appears to be a Boller tie. In Lumsden's way of thinking, such presumption in a middle-class Englishman merits public disgrace.

Paul's acquaintance with Dionysian forces has been more theoretical than actual, and his confident unawareness of the evil around him has reduced his ability to cope with it. So oblivious has he been to the very existence of the Bollinger Club that he cannot conceive of having done anything to incur the wrath of its members. What transpires in his mind while he is being debagged or what his response is to the college authorities when they expel him is never recorded. The detached narrator so rarely delves into characters' innermost thoughts that the reader is often held in a state of uncertainty that heightens the irony of this crucial situation. Although it is possible to deduce from external evidence that neither the guilty Bollinger members nor the witnessing dons, who presumably offer only partial and therefore misleading evidence to the master, have the slightest interest in justice, the bitter reaction of their abused, maligned victim is revealed only when Paul utters his valedictory curse on all the malefactors.

The world into which Paul is thrust also evaluates according to outward manifestations rather than true worth. Every phase of his life as a schoolmaster is fraught with discrepancies. He is initially forced to seek employment because his guardian views expulsion from Oxford as sufficient reason to abrogate Paul's inheritance; the employment agency, though euphemistically recording “indecent behaviour” as “education discontinued for personal reasons” (12), uses Paul's disgrace to refer him to a school of the lowest category; and his employer finds it an excuse to hire him at reduced pay. Even the appearance of the Llanabba school building, misnamed a castle, accentuates the discrepancy between the genuine and the sham, for what had originally been a Georgian country home (and remains so from the back) has had a pretentious medieval fortress superimposed upon its front. Compounding the incongruity of the structure is the irony of Paul's inability to notice it because he arrives at night in a closed taxi.

The instructional system itself is a jumble of contradictions, for Llanabba is dedicated not to teaching and learning but to the semblance of education for wealthy boys who cannot gain admission to a reputable public school. The disparate assessments of young Lord Tangent, first by the unctuous headmaster, Dr. Fagan, and later by Tangent's brutally candid mother, stem from the conflict between rosy façade and harsh reality. Fagan, explaining that “many of the boys come from the very best families,” characterizes “little Lord Tangent …, the Earl of Circumference's son,” as “such a nice little chap, erratic, of course, like all his family, but he has tone” (16). Lady Circumference cuts through the veneer with “The boy's a dunderhead. If he wasn't he wouldn't be here” (85). Although Fagan may equivocate about the quality of his pupils, his less guarded statements and actions expose his fraudulence. While spouting the positive philosophy of educationists, paying lip service to “professional tone,” “vision,” and the “ideal of service and fellowship” (15–16), he encourages his masters to practice something quite different. Under his tutelage, Paul learns to “temper discretion with deceit” (24)—passing himself off as an expert in athletics or organ playing even when he has no competence whatever. On advice from another master, Paul forgets about teaching the boys anything and concentrates upon merely keeping them quiet with busywork. While he struggles with the down-to-earth problems of his situation, the high-flown educational theories offered by his pompous friend Potts further emphasize the discrepancy between educational philosophy and its misapplication at Llanabba.

That Fagan's choice of masters is dictated not by pedagogical considerations but solely by the impressions they make on his patrons is clear from his comments on unsatisfactory employees. Fagan tells of one master “who swore terribly in front of every one” (76) when bitten by a parent's dog; of another he states, “He is not out of the top drawer, and boys notice these things”; of a third, “He used to borrow money from the boys … and the parents objected” (16). Fagan's primary concern is to perpetuate the scholastic charade, which is staged to gain financial support from the school's affluent patrons. The masters, therefore, as part of “the act,” must be favorably received on the superficial level; and their real characters do not matter. When Fagan declines to inquire into the details of Paul's “indecent behaviour,” he lays bare his cynicism and contempt for ideals in his most self-betraying remark: “I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious to conceal” (15).

Against this background, the incident of the £20 offered Paul by Alastair Trumpington to compensate for the ruination of his Oxford career is presented through a delightful series of ironies undermining the inviolable honor code of English gentlemen. Paul's moral dilemma occurs when Potts's incensed refusal of the money is countermanded by less idealistic colleagues at Llanabba. In fact, when Paul admits with double entendre that the £20 represents “a temptation,” the Rev. Prendergast, following through in the religious vein with advice unexpected of a clergyman, replies that “it would be a sin to refuse” (52). Paul's subsequent struggle with his conscience, in which temptation is overcome by the need to keep his self-respect and to prove “the durability of … ideals” (53) bred into him as a gentleman, appears incompatible with his facile accommodation to Fagan's dishonest ways. Since Paul seems to feel no guilt for having compromised educational values, his belief that it would be dishonorable to accept compensation for personal damages becomes particularly absurd, New dimensions in the irony are introduced when the unscrupulous Grimes resolves the problem quite simply. Having forged an acceptance in Paul's name, Grimes explains: “I'm a gentleman too … and I was afraid you might feel like that, so I … saved you from yourself” (54). Paul's delighted response, “in spite of himself,” with a toast “to the durability of ideals” (54) explodes the original meaning of these words. In this altered context a tribute to the undeviating code that Grimes ignores signifies (whether or not Paul realizes it) a more pragmatic orientation toward ideals. Waugh's narrator makes a final comic pass at this episode during the later sports event, when Lady Circumference tells Paul that, according to her sister's account, her nephew Trumpington has recently been fined £20. Only Paul and the reader can deduce the unstated—that Trumpington, to allay his conscience for a previous wrongdoing, has committed another by getting the money under false pretenses.

Though Waugh's account of the Llanabba sports event provides verbal pleasures and unexpected occurrences of small dimension, the main ironic thrust in this section is on a much grander scale. The conflict between assumed appearance and underlying reality is, in fact, presented on two levels—the chaotic sports themselves serving as a microcosm for the competitive tensions of society at large. While Fagan virtually ignores matters necessary for the actual sports (a defined racing course, proper equipment, and rules for judging), he lavishes attention on unessential trivia (flags, fireworks, gilded programs, and champagne cup) designed to curry favor with influential parents. But his elaborate preparations have an uncanny way of backfiring by inducing consequences opposite to what he intends. His desire to effect style by using a real pistol for starting the races brings about the accidental wounding of Lord Tangent. His hope of lending dignity with a band results in unbearably monotonous music and the bandmaster's attempts to pimp for his sister-in-law. The predetermination of athletic winners from among boys of prominent families, which obliges Grimes to declare Clutterbuck a winner despite his cheating, precipitates the embarrassing scene in which Lady Circumference refuses to award the prize. Thus Fagan's misguided hopes of gaining favor turn the gala into a fiasco, and the fraudulence with which the sports are staged totally destroys the sportsmanship supposedly generated by healthy competition.

The visiting parents also lack any sense of fair play in their social competitiveness, as the unresolved tensions among three class-conscious groups illustrate. The Clutterbucks, with a brewing fortune but as yet no seat in Parliament, are defensive about their nouveau-riche status. The obtuse Earl of Circumference and his horsey, outspoken countess exude the smug self-confidence of landed aristocrats. Margot Beste-Chetwynde, fortified by beauty, extraordinary wealth, social standing in Mayfair, and a son who is heir apparent to an earldom, feels so secure that she dares to challenge conventional standards of propriety. She defiantly flaunts her black American lover, whose unconvincing claims to culture further add to the incongruous situation in which everyone seems to be jockeying for position. Amidst expressions of racial prejudice, social antagonism, and political bias, the parental gathering is wrecked by the very people Fagan expected to beguile.

The other principal characters whom Paul meets at Llanabba are also at variance with their outward aspects. The two masters, Grimes and Prendergast, each of whom possesses a serious defect that periodically upsets his equilibrium, are to some extent ironic inversions of one another. Prendergast is well-bred and well-meaning, but his basic inclination to do good is thwarted by lack of strong belief in anything, including himself. Consequently he cannot carry through his intentions or deal with simple problems such as sharing the bath. Unable to resolve theological doubts, he has given up his vocation as parish priest. Yet he fares no better at Llanabba, where his self-pitying, defeatist attitude makes it impossible for him to keep order among the students, win their respect, or associate easily with the other masters. In contrast, Grimes, though vulgar by nature and confirmedly hedonistic, has the self-assurance to be outgoing with his colleagues and to discipline the boys, who respect him partly because his artificial leg has led them to conclude, erroneously, that he was wounded in the war. Most crucial, he has no “doubts.” He is as confident of his “old boy” connections with Harrow as Browning's Pippa is of providential care and knows they will repeatedly get him out of “the soup.” Hence a distinguished public school, the traditional breeding ground of English gentlemen, serves paradoxically as a perpetual safety net for one who is clearly no gentleman.

If the Rev. Prendergast is a burlesque of the questing Anglican clergyman and Capt. Grimes of the immoral schoolmaster, the butler Philbrick is a caricature of the criminal on his way to success. He seems to have no fixed identity but delights in playing different roles in a kaleidoscopic monodrama. The various autobiographical tales he offers to create a protean, polymorphous self are so imaginative as to indicate a superb con artist. All one can be sure of is that a butler with diamonds, pistol, and police on his trail is no ordinary servant. Although Prendergast's overdeveloped conscience is instrumental in his undoing, an ironic detachment from conventional morality enables Philbrick, like Grimes, to flourish, at least for the time being, in a mad world.

Grimes's eventual downfall provides an excellent example of what Muecke labels an irony of events in which the very act designed to prevent an unwanted result becomes the instrument for producing it.⁷ Just as Fagan's efforts to impress his patrons at the sports event have the opposite effect, so Grimes's marriage to his employer's daughter Flossie turns into agony. Having become engaged to her as a means of protecting his job the next time his homosexual indiscretions are discovered, he weds her when in danger of being fired, not knowing that his consequent unhappiness would destroy his ability to stay in the job. He realizes with horror that, despite his lack of sexual interest in women, his primrose path of dalliance has led him directly, in another irony of events, to revolting domesticity; and his fears are reinforced by the vicar's nuptial sermon on “Home and Conjugal Love,” which becomes farcical when viewed against the cynicism that brought the couple together.

Grimes's changed status generates further ironies. Especially with his father-in-law constantly belittling him, he suffers a marked alteration in personality. Just as Prendergast, under the influence of drink, had once become self-confident enough to cane twenty-three boys, so Grimes, under the impact of marriage, becomes despondent, self-pitying, and paranoid. While he at first sees a painful irony in the fact that the elder Clutterbuck's letter about an attractive job in the brewery arrives too late to prevent the marital fiasco, the reader sees an even more poignant irony in Grimes's subsequent misinterpretation of this genuine offer as only a cruel hoax perpetrated against him—one to which any response would be useless. Flossie's attitude toward the unsatisfactory relationship with Grimes is divulged ironically when she refuses to wear mourning after his ostensible suicide. Her cryptic explanation—“I don't think my husband would have expected it of me” (148)—sidesteps her real reason. A hidden irony, of which neither Flossie nor the reader could be aware at this point, arises from the fact that Grimes is still alive.

Whereas the first book begins by focusing on the fall of an innocent, the second book begins by developing King's Thursday, Margot's country home, as an ironic symbol of progress. The Bauhaus monstrosity that Paul finds at the end of an avenue of great chestnuts presents modernity at its worst. Not only is this combination of concrete, steel, and glass quite unappealing in itself, but it is further diminished by comparison with the fine example of Tudor architecture that had until recently stood on the same spot. Although Waugh implies amusing inconsistencies about the earlier mansion—that its original character had been “preserved” by the inaction of indifferent, impecunious earls, and that its crumbling beauty had been most admired by modern preservationists who did not have to cope with its discomforts—the main thrust of the irony is directed toward the new building and the bad taste of its rich new owner. Margot, contrary to the assumptions of neighbors and antiquarians that her wealth would surely restore the ancient structure, demolishes what she considers “bourgeois and awful” to replace it with “something clean and square” (155–56).

Just as illogical is her choice of an architect whose chief qualifications are a rejected factory design and the decor for a film without any human characters. Prof. Silenus's preference for the machine over man, shown in his parody of Hamlet's praise of humanity, has caused him to reduce architecture—domestic as well as industrial—to a problem of accommodating machines rather than people. Since he considers human beings to be only inferior machines, he tells Paul that in ten more years Margot “will be almost worn out” (169). Believing that the machine is the perfection to which humanity should aspire, he makes himself ridiculous by imitating its actions as he tries to eat a biscuit. His fixed expression and the regular motion of his hand and jaws illustrate the assertion of Henri Bergson, one of Waugh's favorite philosophers at the time, that “the attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.”⁸

The mystery surrounding Margot's wealth is presented as an evolving irony, with both Paul and the reader initially in the dark. Gradually through a series of clues the reader is enlightened, whereas Paul, dazzled by Margot's beauty and glamorous world, remains blind to all indications that she is engaged in international prostitution. Grimes's explanation that he got a job with her syndicate because he had no problem controlling himself around women should have suggested to Paul the sexual nature of her enterprise. Her incisive manner in questioning prospective employees could have alerted him to the type of women she is dealing with, while her preference for inexperienced girls, who do not even need to know Spanish to work in Latin America, might have aroused more than mild curiosity or puzzlement. Certainly Philbrick's warning that the League of Nations Committee will soon be after Margot, to which Paul ingenuously replies, “I haven't the least idea what you mean” (196), should have raised serious suspicions. But Paul interprets everything according to his erroneous perception that Margot can do no wrong. When sent to Marseilles, where some of the girls are having emigration difficulties, he naively assumes, upon finding them in a red-light district, that Margot is showing her usual concern for the welfare of employees “unwittingly exposed to such perils” (203); and the officials' oblique allusions to the League of Nations and its efforts to stop white slave traffic are totally lost on him. Comprehending neither the girls' situation nor the winks and innuendos of the authorities, he concludes his negotiations with the perfectly innocent remark, which they take to be ironic humor, that the League of Nations seems “to make it harder to get about instead of easier” (207).

The involvement of Arthur Potts in the exposé of Margot's syndicate is another ironic thread running through this section of the novel. Having once been Paul's best friend, he becomes his nemesis. Had Paul been shrewder, he might have attached some significance to Potts's recurring appearances as a League of Nations representative just when Margot is transacting business—at King's Thursday with Grimes, in London with the interviewees, and in Marseilles through Paul's assistance. But not having learned enough about either Margot's profession or Potts's work, Paul sees no relationship and cannot fit the pieces of the puzzle into one another. Indeed it seems unlikely to him that, as Potts apparently thinks, his journey to France could interfere with his forthcoming wedding. Yet it is Potts's evidence at the trial that convicts Paul and does prevent the ceremony from taking place. Paul's expectations of a bright future, indicated by his toast to Fortune as “a much-maligned lady,” are shattered by his arrest and prison sentence while the guilty Margot, whom the judge calls “a lady of … stainless reputation” (216), goes scot-free.

Much of the irony in Paul's prison experience is satiric, for Waugh attacks avant-garde theories of penology that seem to lack practical value. He appropriately names the first house of correction to which Paul is sent Blackstone Gaol, after one of Britain's most famous legal theoreticians, Sir William Blackstone; and for his prime target he creates the character of Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery, a former sociology professor turned prison governor. Sir Wilfred, who dabbles in psychoanalysis for the rehabilitation of prisoners, is one of Waugh's fatuous do-gooders whose theories crumble upon contact with reality and who therefore do more harm than good. Disapproving of Paul's request for continuation of the solitary confinement to which he had happily adjusted, the governor, believing that Paul has become misanthropic as the result of inferiority feelings, devises a complicated scheme “to break down his social inhibitions” (234). In trying to apply another of his favorite ideas—that inmates should continue the professional interests of their former life—Sir Wilfred is completely frustrated because Paul's alleged profession, white slave trafficking, cannot be carried on in prison. Even so, the self-deceived governor assumes that, in addition to bringing about a revolution in sociological statistics, he can improve Paul's self-image by removing prostitutional crime from its customary “sexual” classification and placing it in the less reprehensible “acquisitive” category (226).

One of Sir Wilfred's hypotheses—“that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression” (226)—has most unexpected results throughout the prison. There are several attempted suicides in the arts and crafts school because of easy access to sharp tools, and the men in the bookbinding shop eat the library paste because it tastes better than their porridge. Finally there is a murder—of Prendergast, now prison chaplain, who has reappeared as a “Modern Churchman” with no need to “commit himself to any religious belief” (188). That he should be done in by a bloodthirsty religious fanatic who considers him “no Christian” is certainly ironic, though possibly not inappropriate, justice. But that the saw with which the former carpenter cuts off Prendergast's head should have been supplied by prison authorities is the climactic example of Sir Wilfred's theories gone awry. Although the saw may have provided the carpenter a means of self-expression, the result is the opposite of what the governor intended.

While Paul is in prison, his comprehension of both human nature and moral complexity is enhanced to the point that he ceases to be a naif. Since his reflections about Margot during many weeks of solitary confinement lead him to conflicting conclusions, he is forced to step back from his infatuation with her and take a more realistic view. Though sure that by shielding her from prosecution he has done what the code of an English gentleman demands, he also realizes that, despite her gifts of books, flowers, sherry, and exotic food, she has not done right by him. Moreover, he suspects that there is “something radically inapplicable” about the gentlemanly code when the woman he has protected is so obviously guilty and therefore unworthy of his sacrifice (252). But in trying to imagine Margot adapting to prison life—“dressed in prison uniform, hustled down corridors by wardresses, … set to work in the laundry washing the other prisoners' clothes” (253)—he is convinced that such circumstances would be inconceivable. Interpreting the troublesome contradiction in terms of “one law for her and another for himself” (253), he is able for the first time to approach a problem ironically, acknowledging that there is no absolute right or wrong in either of the radically disparate perspectives.

Even so, Paul is still not sophisticated enough to perceive the deviousness of Margot's thinking, which she never elucidates. Waugh's superb use of irony, however, makes it possible for the reader to surmise what transpires in her mind without ever requiring the narrator to explain. While one cannot be certain which choice Margot expects Paul to make—being released immediately if she marries Home Secretary Maltravers or waiting until he has served his sentence to marry her himself—Paul's decision to wait is apparently not what she wants. Although the reader is never told why she finally goes to see him in prison, one can deduce that she wishes to conclude their relationship in an amicable fashion. Yet her method is so oblique—she herself admits “how difficult it is to say anything” (263)—that Paul fails to comprehend. The clues to Margot's underlying thoughts are two seemingly unrelated, though juxtaposed, statements—that Lady Circumference has snubbed her and that “poor little Alastair” is falling in love with her (260)—first expressed in her letter to Paul and later reiterated in their prison conversation. But Paul sees no connection between these assertions or any significance beyond their literal meaning, nor can he follow her subsequent reasoning. Since his replies reveal his own very different train of thought, the conversation takes place on two planes that never intersect.

His inquiry about Alastair leads Margot to lament that she is being cut socially by people who no longer regard her as “a respectable woman” (261); but this response then prompts Paul to ask about her “business,” to which he would logically attribute society's rejection. Although in answering his direct question Margot asserts that she is selling out because “a Swiss firm” has created difficulties, she insists that the ostracism must be caused by her age. When Paul again fails to grasp the connection she is trying to convey—that high society thinks her too old to be carrying on with young men such as Alastair—she abandons indirection and simply announces her decision to marry Maltravers. Since she never explains why such a marriage would be the best solution to her multifarious problems, all that Paul learns from their meeting is that, to his astonishment, he is pained not by the breaking off of their engagement but by his own failure to care. The reader, on the other hand, is able to conclude, from what is already known about Margot and Maltravers, that Margot needs married respectability and political influence to protect her prostitution syndicate from the law and that Maltravers would also be the sort of husband to ignore her nymphomania if she shared her income with him. Clearly, what is never explicitly stated in the conversation is far more important than what is said. This disparity between thought and spoken word, in combination with the characters' divergent ways of interpreting the same ideas and with the basic discrepancy between pretense and reality, creates an unusually ingenious way of presenting the episode.

But if resignation is the key to Paul's survival, such is not the case with Grimes, whose free spirit cannot bear restraint. His marriage to Flossie, which was expected to save him and his career from homosexual disgrace, has instead landed him, through conviction for bigamy, in a prison from which no inmate has successfully escaped. In a burlesque of adventure-story flights from incarceration, the narrator offers a mock-heroic account of Grimes's disappearance that is bolstered by the author's sketch of Grimes riding a white charger into the heavens and bearing a pennant inscribed “Excelsior.” Although circumstantial evidence points to the likelihood that the prisoner perished in the bog, Paul confidently believes that Grimes is immortal—an elemental life force, indeed the sex drive itself. In a parodic imitation of Pater's imaginative criticism of La Gioconda, Paul employs wildly extravagant allusions to convince himself that a man who “had followed in the Bacchic train of distant Arcady, … taught the childish satyrs the art of love,” and withstood divine wrath “while the Citadels of the Plain fell to ruin about his ears” (269) will follow his usual pattern of turning up alive elsewhere. While Pater's ecstatic eulogy of the Mona Lisa as the embodiment of eternal life and the summation of all human experience is appropriate for da Vinci's masterpiece, Paul's hyperbolic reveries about Grimes as undying sexuality become ludicrous when placed in the same framework. Furthermore, in the light of Paul's belief in the immortality of Grimes, whose fate is never determined, the chaplain's self-reproach for not having prevented Grimes's death adds another ironic twist to the episode entitled “The Passing of a Public-School Man.”

Paul's escape from prison is a carefully orchestrated charade of death, about which he knows nothing in advance. A number of inexplicable occurrences lead Paul, as well as the reader, to suspect that he may be headed for execution on the operating table. His scheduled appendectomy seems ridiculous since he no longer has an appendix; he is asked to sign a previously witnessed last will and testament leaving his worldly goods to Margot; the warder who escorts him to the nursing home makes ambiguous winks and sly innuendos about the possibility of death; and the drunken surgeon utters maudlin lamentations. Since Prendergast and Grimes have been finally disposed of in the two preceding episodes, the reader has even more reason to think that the hero will be finished off in the chapter entitled “The Passing of Paul Pennyfeather.” But all aspects of the “death,” arranged by Home Secretary Maltraves and Alastair Trumpington in the service of Margot, turn out to be fraudulent: the nursing home is run by Dr. Fagan (now M.D. rather than Ph.D.), no operation is performed, and the surgeon signs a fake death certificate. In this manner, some of the very people who contributed to Paul's downfall and imprisonment achieve his liberation; by staging his “death,” they give him a new existence.

Imbedded in the account of Paul's demise are numerous ironic comparisons, both parallel and inverse, with his aborted wedding. At the luncheon preceding the nuptial ceremony, he is “the centre of interest of the whole room” (209); but while Fagan, Alastair, and the surgeon deal with the legal documents, “no one [pays] much attention” to him (275). Each occasion results in a dramatic change in Paul's status, but while the first one, about which he has great expectations, plunges him from fame into disgrace, the second, about which he suffers considerable apprehension, turns his imprisonment into freedom. Fagan's toast to “Fortune, a much-maligned lady,” recalls Paul's previous tribute to that fickle goddess just before his arrest. This time Margot assumes the role of Fortune and, instead of bringing bad luck, aids Paul with all her resources, while Alastair, in managing details of the “death” and in accompanying Paul to Margot's waiting yacht, plays a role analogous to his earlier function as best man. In another ironic comparison, Paul's transition into apparent death is cleverly set up as a parallel to Tennyson's account of the passing of Arthur. The farewell on the seashore, in which Sir Alastair is recast as Sir Bedivere watching the dying King Arthur embark for Avalon, places Paul's unromantic escape from imprisonment in the context of hallowed legend. Just as Arthur is spirited away to an island paradise to be healed of his wound and possibly to return, so Paul is carried off to Corfu to be resurrected with a new identity. But the mock-heroic manner of his departure and the inappropriateness of the allusions serve to emphasize the unheroic nature of the old Paul Pennyfeather.

After Paul's legal extinction, it is incongruous that one of the most profound judgments on his past life should be uttered by the pompous fool Silenus. Despite having failed in all his undertakings (including a belated decision to marry Margot), this self-deceived, self-styled “professor” pontificates with characteristic lack of humility on how Paul went wrong. According to his mechanistic theory, life is like a giant carnival wheel surrounded by a seated audience, and humanity is divided into two species—the dynamic, who scramble onto the revolving wheel, and the static, who merely watch. The majority of those on the wheel are repeatedly thrown off by centrifugal force; the successfully hedonistic, like Margot, cling tenaciously to the rapidly moving outer rim for maximum thrills, while those whom Silenus enigmatically labels “the professional men” make their way with determination toward the hub, where it is easier to stay on. In Silenus's opinion, Paul's error was to have climbed onto the wheel at all; his place should logically have been among the spectators. The most obvious error, however, is Silenus's own assessment of himself. Unable to distinguish between the stability of the wheel's fixed center and the immobility of the stationary audience, he thinks he has arrived very near the center when he is most certainly on the sidelines.

However Paul's mistake may be interpreted, he does not repeat it. The subtle montage of the last section, whereby his altered responses are superimposed on recollections of his earlier Oxford existence, shows that Paul has profited from the intervening experiences without becoming radically different. Oxford itself is unchanged: the chaplain and Paul's scout continue to judge his “distant cousin,” the “degenerate” Pennyfeather, solely on erroneous hearsay. Paul, again the ordinand but this time heavily mustachioed, gravitates toward a friend who, like Potts, is also interested in the League of Nations Union, penal alleviation, and theology. Yet Paul's attitude toward all this has matured from what it was in his previous incarnation. Though he continues to be concerned with social and religious causes, he has become more cautiously conservative toward life and religion.

That Paul deliberately severs detrimental links to his past is clear. By placing Fagan's book Mother Wales beside Stanley's Eastern Church, an account of religious schism, he tacitly implies rejection of both. By not responding to the now opulent Philbrick's invitation and by falsely identifying him as Arnold Bennett (in an ironic allusion to another con artist who had parlayed questionable talents into wealth), Paul denigrates that connection as well. In dealing with Peter Pastmaster, now the embodiment of the Bollinger, he concedes his own folly in having become involved with Margot and her “dynamic” breed; but, with the observation that Peter has already drunk too much, he brushes aside the proposal of a toast to “Fortune, a much-maligned lady.” Having previously allowed himself to be buffeted by fortune, Paul is determined to wrest control of his own destiny whenever possible. Ironic detachment, even if it means withdrawal from the whirligig of life, can serve as a practical defense against the world's corruption. Experience has taught him something about where to engage and where, in the interest of survival, to disengage himself. True sophistication, he has discovered, depends on knowing which strategy to employ.

Notes

1. Jerome Meckier considers the novel to be an attack on the Bildungsroman. See his “Cycle, Symbol, and Parody in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall,” Contemporary Literature, 20 (1979): 51–75.

2. Muecke identifies romantic irony primarily with the contradictions of art and relates it to general irony—awareness of the ineluctable contradictions of life. See Compass of Irony, 159–215. The breaking and remaking of artistic illusion is especially associated with the German writers Ludwig Tieck and Jean Paul Richter, as well as the English poets Coleridge and Byron.

3. Philosophical discussion about reality versus illusion or appearance, stimulated by the writings of F. H. Bradley, continued to be in vogue at the time Decline and Fall was composed.

4. Waugh, Decline and Fall (1928; reprint, Boston: Little, 1977), 164. Subsequent quotations from this edition of the novel are cited parenthetically in the text.

5. W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” lines 3–4.

6. Waugh, Little Learning, 169, 171.

7. Muecke, Compass of Irony, 102.

8. Henri Bergson, Laughter, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 29. Waugh's Letters (3) and Diaries (215, 218) establish his reading of Bergson, which he began at Lancing. Stannard (Evelyn Waugh: Early Years) and McCartney (Confused Roaring) have discussed Bergsonian philosophy in Waugh's writing but have not mentioned the essay Laughter.