[In the following excerpt, Stannard discusses some of the short stories as they relate to Waugh's development as a writer and his career as a novelist.]

The ‘novel’ which had begun as a ‘cinema film’ was knocked into shape as a long, avant-garde short story. ‘I have finished my story’, [Waugh] noted on 26th August, ‘which I have called “The Balance” and took it to be typed. It is odd but, I think, quite good.’¹ Christopher Sykes states that it was, in fact, rather bad. That is unfair. The tale, of course, lacks the accomplished touch of Waugh's later stories and he himself thought it second-rate. It has never been reprinted. But, at the lowest estimate, it is an arresting piece of experimental writing and was recognised as such when it appeared. From a biographical viewpoint it is even more intriguing. As his first sustained attempt at fiction, written during a protracted period of misfortune, completed less than two months after the aborted suicide, it represents an effort (as earlier with ‘Anthony’) to rationalise his disordered life through artistic expression.

‘The Balance’ draws heavily on personal experience. It is the only piece of Waugh's fiction which included the Oxford book auction, the Art School setting or the attempted suicide. Other details—the carelessness of the heroine for the hero's love, the failure as an artist, the pretentious valedictory Latin note and the apparent indifference of his Oxford cronies—can leave us in no doubt. Waugh was summing up his life here.

The ‘balance’ concerned is ‘the balance between appetite and reason’. A bold experiment in narrative technique, the story is for the most part written as a scenario for a silent film about the characters involved. Large captions indicating place, time, and occasionally, dialogue, break up the page and shift the scenes. The characters speak a great deal but this is, presumably, not heard by the audience. Gladys and Ada (a cook and a parlourmaid) and someone ‘with a Cambridge accent’ sit in the stalls offering bemused or arrogantly ‘arty’ comments: ‘These Bo'emians don't'alf carry on, eh, Gladys?’ or ‘It is curious the way that they can never make their heroes and heroines talk like ladies and gentlemen—particularly in moments of emotion.’ The film, the second of four sections, ends with Adam Doure's (the hero's) death by suicide in an Oxford hotel bedroom and the audience leaves uttering banalities. But there follows a ‘Conclusion’ in lucid analytical prose, in which Adam revives from his coma and remembers vomiting ingloriously over the balcony during the night, despite all efforts to hold down his poison.

He takes stock of the situation and recalls an incident when, as a child, he had fallen from a chair balanced precariously at a great height:

Later he learned to regard these periods between his fall and the dismayed advent of help from below, as the first promptings towards that struggle for detachment in which he had not, without almost frantic endeavour, finally acknowledged defeat in the bedroom of the Oxford hotel.

The first phase of detachment had passed and had been succeeded by one of methodical investigation. Almost simultaneously with his acceptance of continued existence had come the conception of pain—vaguely at first as of a melody played by another to which his senses were only fitfully attentive, but gradually taking shape as the tangible objects about him gained in reality, until at length it appeared as a concrete thing, external but intimately attached to himself. Like the pursuit of quicksilver with a spoon, Adam was able to chase it about the walls of his consciousness until at length he drove it into a corner in which he could examine it at his leisure. Still lying perfectly still, with his limbs half embracing the wooden legs of the chair, Adam was able, by concentrating his attention on each part of his body in turn, to exclude the disordered sensations to which his fall had given rise and trace the several constituents of the bulk of pain down their vibrating channels to their sources in his various physical injuries.²

The metaphorical parallel between Waugh's and Adam's new position of detachment is self-explanatory. As Adam walks along the ‘towing path away from Oxford’ he thinks abstractedly of his fellow guests in the hotel that morning:

All around him a macabre dance of shadows had reeled and flickered, and in and out of it Adam had picked his way, conscious only of one insistent need, percolating through to him from the world outside, of immediate escape from the scene upon which this bodiless harlequinade was played, into a third dimension beyond it.³

It is a dangerous and largely futile business attempting to correlate an author's life with incidents in his fiction. Waugh suffered greatly in later years from misguided critics searching for models of his fictional characters. He always insisted, quite rightly, that the good writer created and transformed, never transcribed. But ‘The Balance’ is, perhaps, the most significant exception to this rule in his opus. Indeed, it alluded to autobiographical secrets (such as the attempted suicide) not revealed until the publication of A Little Learning (1964). Quite apart from any aesthetic consideration of the story's technical merit, one of the reasons for his refusal to reprint it must have been the embarrassing intimacy of its subject-matter. It gave too much of himself away. There is a great deal of the young Waugh in Adam Doure and the author's friends must have recognised the correspondence. All the evidence points to the fact that his hero's vision of the world as a ‘bodiless harlequinade’ and his resulting ‘struggle for detachment’ were Waugh's own.

The third section, ‘Conclusion’, ends with a dialogue between Adam and his reflection as he leans over a bridge after the destruction of the suicide note. He has found no secret, it appears, only ‘bodily strength’ in the discovery of the true nature of ‘the balance’, that necessary state of mental equilibrium in a phantasmagoric and unreliable world. Unlike the Romantic and Victorian dilemmas, this is not seen as a balance between ‘life and death’, but between ‘appetite and reason’ in which ‘the reason remains constant’ (but largely ineffectual) and ‘the appetite varies’. The implicit difficulty in this realisation is that appetite has no absolute value as a directing principle; its object achieved, it either ceases to exist or is re-directed and re-defined. Even the appetite for death ‘is appeased by sleep and the passing of time’. There is no ‘reason’, no ‘honour to be observed to friends’, no ‘interpenetration, so that you cannot depart without bearing away with you something that is part of another’. Even Adam's art is only ‘the appetite to live—to preserve in the shapes of things the personality whose dissolution you foresee inevitably’. And in the end ‘circumstance decides’, not the individual. The paradox suggested by this vision is of man simultaneously isolated (‘no interpenetration’) and left without individual identity.

For the artist seeking to depict this dilemma the problem of his own subjectivity generates further complications; he must somehow detach himself from the life he describes while at the same time suggesting that detachment in all but the most superficial respects is impossible. This led to Waugh's use of the film scenario here and largely governed the more subtle stylistic detachment, the apparent comic indifference, of his early novels. They are not flippant, as so many reviewers presumed; quite the reverse.

He became a serious writer as much interested in stylistic innovation as Joyce or Gertrude Stein. He was even concerned with the identical aesthetic problem of developing a new form of literary expression which banished the author's intrusive voice. But there is an essential difference between Waugh and the ‘serious’ avant-garde. Behind all their experiments lies the assumption that there exists a reality, disjointed and cacophonous, but a reality waiting to be described in all its complexity. In ‘The Balance,’ indeed in all Waugh's later work, this assumption is challenged. Circumstance decides but, however accurately observed, these constituent events are not ‘truth’, merely an accurate description of falsehood. Neither man's actions, nor his words, can embody an empirical truth. Circumstance alone decides and, at this stage (1925–6), circumstance is seen as the inadvertent product of collective action.

The last section is entitled ‘Continuation’, the implication being that no conclusion is possible, that the individual, swept along by circumstance, can exert little influence over his condition. The scene is the elegant luncheon table of a country house. The hostess, mother of one of Adam's Oxford friends, has invited all the bright young people of her son's set. They sit about gossiping. Adam has not been invited. He flickers briefly in the conversation and then is extinguished. They pass on to the next trivial issue. Imogen Quest, the heroine, wants desperately to meet a man who is ‘short and dirty with masses of hair’. Throughout the brief interlude there are constant references to the guests smoking at table—something Waugh, with his fastidious manners, found repulsive. The hostess thinks the scene charming and ‘chic’. Waugh offers no authorial comment but the implication is clear enough. He is mocking them. There is a scarcely suppressed rage at their treatment of Adam, a bitter resentment that his ‘reality’, his complex psychological and moral ‘being’, is no more to them than a shadow in a piece of amusing tattle.

At the root of many of Evelyn's complex emotional difficulties, surely, there lay this obsessive fear of enforced anonymity. What happened to Adam must never happen to him. He would not be absorbed into the crowd. In the Diaries of the period we see: ‘This morning a letter from Richard [Greene] telling me that the Greene family are quarrelling with me. I just don't mind. This sort of thing has happened before so often that it has ceased to shock me. I shall have to regard all my friendships as things of three to six months. It makes everything easier.’⁴ …

While at work on [Black Mischief] in March 1932, Waugh wrote his story for the John Bull series, eventually entitled ‘The Seven Deadly Sins of Today’. His short advertisement for the tale appeared in April:

Twenty-five years ago it was the fashion for those who considered themselves enlightened and progressive to cry out against intolerance as the one damning sin of their time.

The agitation was well-founded and it resulted in the elimination from our social system of many elements that are crude and unjust. But in the general revolution of opinion that has followed, has not more been lost than gained?

It is better to be narrow-minded than to have no mind, to hold limited and rigid principles than none at all.

That is the danger which faces so many people today—to have no considered opinions on any subject, to put up with what is wasteful and harmful with the excuse that there is ‘good in everything’—which in most cases means inability to distinguish between good and bad.

There are still things which are worth fighting against.⁵

Waugh's approach is fundamentally aggressive. This ‘preface’ precisely describes his distaste for his father's benevolent optimism. The story which followed was entitled ‘Too Much Tolerance’.

The tale (never re-published) was printed under the heading ‘Real Life Stories’ and is told in the first person. It describes his meeting (probably in Djibouti) with a whimsical, middle-aged liberal humanist who (like Arthur) has reacted against the strictures of a repressive Victorian childhood. He sees no fault in anyone but, as confidence grows between narrator and subject, a life of betrayal and humiliation is revealed. ‘As I watched’, it concludes, ‘he finished his business and strode off towards the town—a jaunty, tragic little figure, cheated out of his patrimony by his partner, battened on by an obviously worthless son, deserted by his wife, an irrepressible, bewildered figure striding off under his bobbing topee, cheerfully battering his way into a whole continent of rapacious and ruthless jolly fellows.’⁶ ‘Jolly fellows’, of course, is heavily ironical. The anti-hero of the story had been quite unable to discriminate between the various races and their internecine factions: ‘“Can't understand what all the trouble's about. They're all jolly chaps when you get to know them.”’ ‘British officials, traders, Arabs, natives, Indian settlers—they were all to my new friend jolly good chaps.’⁷

To Waugh there were fundamental racial distinctions to be made, particularly between the Arabs and the Indians. Africa was an analogue for the world at large. Rather than adopting his father's gently tolerant belief in the essential goodness of man, Waugh saw the world as largely populated by a rabble of potential or actual savages, ‘rapacious’, vigilant for the first signs of weakness to move in for the kill. This savagery was all the more dangerous when disguised beneath the trappings of civilization.

Waugh wrote several other short stories during or immediately after the composition of Black Mischief and all can be related to this theme, just as the theme itself becomes a structural leit-motif of the novel. ‘The Patriotic Honeymoon’, ‘Bella Fleace Gave a Party’, ‘Cruise’ and ‘Incident in Azania’ are light pieces written hastily for a quick cash return. But Waugh wrote nothing badly and all touch on serious themes: infidelity, death, the dereliction of the English language and the consequent, implicit inability of the characters to comprehend their own active cruelty. In Waugh's phrase, they ‘have no mind’; beneath their complacent, dull surfaces, they are mad, bad and dangerous to know, insane with the vanity of benevolence, driven by malice, or simply effete. Violence and betrayal characterise their world. …

[Mid-1933] It was a period of considerable anxiety and one in which he appears to have associated himself with the recurrent figure of the lost man. Both ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’ and ‘Out of Depth’ centre on this image. The first effectively represents the scenes of Tony Last's imprisonment by Mr Todd (only the names and other minor details being altered) and will be best dealt with later in the context of A Handful of Dust. ‘Out of Depth’ … merits close examination here as a of his mood. It is a substantial piece, subtitled ‘An Experiment Begun in Shaftesbury Avenue and Ended in Time’.⁸

He wrote it in July 1933, immediately after finishing the Passing Show series, ‘I Step Off the Map’ (a running title which possibly had more than literal significance). The story concerns a forty-three-year-old American, Rip Van Winkle. Born a Catholic he has become a fashionable, cosmopolitan agnostic. Like Waugh, he had ‘reached the age when he disliked meeting new people’. Unlike Waugh, though, he has lived immune from questions about ‘time and matter and spirit’. Taking dinner at Margot Metroland's he meets a Mr Jagger (‘Kakophilos’ in the revised 1936 text) who speaks in ‘a thin Cockney voice’. The man is introduced as a magician and appears to be fraudulent (his accent slips from sonorous, ‘poetic’ intonation to shrill East End vocables).

Jagger is cold, rude and threatening. Later in the evening when Alastair Trumpington and Rip return to the man's flat, he parades in a ‘crimson robe embroidered with gold symbols and a comical crimson hat’, garments which provoke unrestrained hilarity in the two drunken boulevardiers. Jagger asks them which period of history they would choose to visit were it possible for them to become time-travellers. Alastair randomly selects the age of Ethelred the Unready and Rip, with equal facetiousness, states that, being an American, he ‘would sooner go forward—say five hundred years’. Leaving the man's house in search of more drink, they turn a corner and drive broadside into a mail van ‘thundering down Shaftesbury Avenue at forty-five miles an hour’.

Rip awakens in the same place but in the twenty-fifth century. All signs of ‘civilisation’ have disappeared. The tube station is a flooded hole in the ground. Symbolically, Eros (the Greek god of Love) is missing from its pedestal in what was Piccadilly Circus. No buildings exist other than fifty or so huts on stilts to raise them above the tidal floods and mud flats of the Thames. The night is characterised by a penetrating silence. Darkness and chaos rule. The people of this ‘Lunnon’ are savages, shy and ignorant, their aesthetic sensibility and language decayed: ‘They spoke slowly in the sing-song tones of an unlettered race who depend on an oral tradition for the preservation of their lore’. In his incongruous evening suit, Rip appears first as an object of mystery.

Silently the savages surround him and begin ‘to finger his outlandish garments, tapping his crumpled shirt with their horny nails and plucking at his studs and buttons’. Their curiosity is soon supplanted by suspicion: gently they place him under guard, feeding him as the days pass on ‘fish, coarse bread and heavy, viscous beer’, squatting on their haunches to discuss him in unintelligible patois. Rip closes his eyes and says to himself, ‘“I am in London, in nineteen-thirty-three, staying at the Ritz Hotel. I drank too much at Margot's. Have to go carefully in future. Nothing really wrong. I am in the Ritz in nineteen-thirty-three.”’ Forcing his ‘will towards sanity’, he is at last convinced of the truth of his proposition. But when he opens his eyes again he sees ‘… early morning on the river, a cluster of wattle huts, a circle of barbarous faces’.

‘Lunnon’, the surrounding villages, and by implication the world, are ruled by negroes, some of whom arrive in a launch to barter goods. The Londoners spend their time raking the debris of their civilisation in a form of crude archaeology. In return for ‘pieces of machinery and ornament, china and glass and carved stonework’ the black overlords (dressed smartly in vaguely fascist uniforms of leather and fur) provide ‘bales of thick cloth, cooking utensils, fish hooks, knife-blades and axe-heads’. Once discovered, Rip is taken by the leader on a ‘phantasmagoric’ journey down river. ‘“This is not a dream,”’ he says to himself. ‘“It is simply that I have gone mad.” Then more blackness and wilderness.’ Something, however, saves his sanity:

And then later—how much later he could not tell—something that was new and yet ageless. The word ‘Mission’ painted on a board: a black man dressed as a Dominican friar … and a growing clearness. Rip knew that out of strangeness, there had come into being something familiar; a shape in chaos. … Something was being done that Rip knew; something that twenty-five centuries had not altered; of his own childhood which had survived the age of the world. In a log-built church at the coast town he was squatting among a native congregation … ; all round him dishevelled white men were staring ahead with vague, uncomprehending eyes, to the end of the room where two candles burned. The priest turned towards them his bland, black face.

‘Ite, missa est.’⁹

The tale ends with Rip, back in the twentieth century, coming round in hospital. Talking to the priest at his bedside, he asks the cleric how he (the priest) came to be there. Sir Alastair apparently had asked for him. Alastair wasn't a Catholic but he had suffered a disturbing dream about the Middle Ages and had felt the need for a priest. Learning that Rip was in the same establishment, the priest had come along to see how he was. ‘“Father,”’ Rip replies in the last line, ‘“I want to make a confession … I have experimented in black art.”’

In some ways it is a simple fable, dexterously told. Waugh himself presumably considered it slight as he refused to have it reprinted. In one sense it is a Christmas story reaffirming the continuity and lucidity of Catholic teaching. Rip's return to the Church from the apathetic sleep of agnosticism signals his unconscious recognition of the link between civilisation and faith. The horror he experiences, though, is not unlike that of Conrad's Marlow in Heart of Darkness: ‘And this, also [London], has been one of the dark places of the earth.’¹⁰ As has been said, there is no evidence of Waugh's having read this work. Unlike Graham Greene, Waugh found Conrad an unsympathetic writer. But the comparison remains useful both for the similarities and differences it throws up.

The second half of Waugh's tale is strongly reminiscent of Marlow's voyage on the Congo, even to the ‘phantasmagoric journey downstream’ and Rip having his head measured with callipers. Both works suggest the temporary nature of civilisation. ‘The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires’¹¹ are powerful emblems of man's attempts to impose idealisms upon chaos. To both Waugh and Conrad, this materialist idealism is delusory. Both refute nineteenth-century concepts of progress and question the validity of seeing history as a linear sequence of cause and effect. Yet there is an obvious point at which they part company. Where Conrad suggests that chaos and darkness must inevitably reclaim all attempts at control, Waugh remains a stolid, fundamentalist theologian. The artefacts and culture of a civilisation may decay but the Faith, that island of sanity in a raving world, will survive.

The story is of particular interest from a biographical point of view in that it represents Waugh's first overtly apologetic work of fiction. From this, one inevitably looks forward to Brideshead Revisited (1945) and what renders this tale even more peculiar is that there was a twelve-year gap before Waugh's defence of his faith finds its way back into his fiction. His ‘Open Letter’ had stressed the idea that he was not, as a writer who was a Catholic, required to produced overtly propagandist art. Suddenly, only two months later, he did precisely that.

Notes

1. Ibid., 26 August, 1925, p. 218.

2. Evelyn Waugh, ‘The Balance. A Yarn of the Good Old Days of Broad Trousers and High-Necked Jumpers,’ Georgian Stories 1926, ed. Alec Waugh (Chapman & Hall, 1926), p. 286.

3. Ibid., p. 287.

4. Diaries, 18 May, 1925, p. 212.

5. JB, 2 April, 1932, 7.

6. ‘Too Much Tolerance,’ JB, 21 May, 1932, 21, 24.

7. Ibid., p. 21.

8. ‘Out of Depth’ was reprinted with substantial revisions in Waugh's collection, Mr Loveday's Little Outing and Other Sad Stories (Chapman and Hall, 1936), pp. 121–38, and in Charles A. Bradey (ed.), A Catholic Reader (Buffalo, NY, Desmond and Stapleton, 1947) with a commentary by Brady, pp. 78–9. Waugh did not include it in Penguin Books' Work Suspended and Other Stories (Harmondsworth, 1943), nor has it appeared in subsequent Penguin editions with this title. Quotations are from the Mr Loveday text unless otherwise stated.

9. ‘Out of Depth,’ Mr Loveday's …, pp. 136–7.

10. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (first published 1902; reprinted Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1973 and 1976), p. 7.

11. Ibid., p. 7.