SOURCE: “The Failure of Imagination: Waugh's School Stories,” in Evelyn Waugh and the Forms of His Time, edited by Virgil Nemoianu, The Catholic University of American Press, 1989, pp. 178–88.

[In the following excerpt, Davis examines an untitled early fragment of a story and “Charles Ryder's Schooldays” in an attempt to discern the autobiographical nature of Waugh's stories.]

The publication of Evelyn Waugh's biography, diaries, letters, and collected journalism over the past ten years had confirmed without much altering the suspicion of earlier readers that there is in his novels a very clear and at the same time uneasy relationship between what he lived and what he imagined. His heroes, all the way from Pennyfeather to Pinfold, obviously share some of their creator's experiences, and just as obviously Waugh isolated and inflated some of his own fears and fantasies into such diverse types as Adam Fenwick-Symes, Basil Seal, and Guy Crouchback. The conversion of fact into fiction or, more recently, the embodiment of psychic patterns in the fiction has furnished material for a kind of high-level gossip (which Waugh would by no means have deplored) or even for studies of the way in which his imagination worked. However, Waugh's efforts to escape into realism, into a more or less direct presentation of the persona of the everyday, discursive-prosewriting self, throw considerable light on his mind and method precisely because he failed to do so.

Two obvious occasions in which he flirted with self-revelation in fiction are Work Suspended and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, but in both he used techniques of displacement, first into invented circumstances, next into a split between conscious and unconscious mind, resolved only by suppression of the unconscious which Pinfold and his creator regard as victory. Less well known, but more interesting as attempts at self-presentation, are two fragments, written twenty-five years apart, in which Waugh tried and failed to make realistic fiction from biographical fact. The first is a fragmentary novel, written at the end of 1920 while he was still a schoolboy;¹ the second is “Charles Ryder's Schooldays,” written about the time of his forty-second birthday in 1945.²

The untitled fragment—actually a fragment of a fragment, since the manuscript at the Humanities Research Center ends in mid-sentence—is a highly self-conscious attempt to enter “the family trade of literature.” The work is dedicated “To Myself,” and the dedicatory letter speaks of the difficulties faced by an author whose “surroundings … have been entirely literary.” Willing to accept responses like “Another of these precocious Waughs … one more nursery novel,” he concludes that he has “not been crushed in the mill of professionalism.” As evidence from the diaries and from the fragment itself indicate, Evelyn aspired to authorship in order to compete with his brother Alec, the elder by five years. In 1920, Alec was clearly dominant. His first novel, The Loom of Youth, portrayed school life so realistically that Evelyn could not attend his brother's—and father's—school, and Alec's war service was enviable but not emulable. On the other hand, Evelyn had a low opinion of Alec's friends and on occasion an even lower opinion of his style. During Evelyn's Lancing years, Alec's appearances frequently inspired Evelyn to turn from schoolwork to writing. In fact, his first note about the novel—assuming that the manuscript at HRC and the one mentioned in the Diaries are the same—calls it “the study of a man with two characters, by his brother” (Diaries, 107) and came about a week after Alec and his first wife—commemorated in A Little Learning as Evelyn's guide and playfellow—rescued him from a boring day at Lancing.

The story opens with Peter Audley's waking to a bleak March day in 1918 and follows him to his pit, or study; to breakfast; to a boring history lesson; and to preparations for Physical Training. A telegram summons him home for the visit of his brother Ralf, on leave after three years in the trenches. Greeted by Ralf and by Moira Gage, the vicar's daughter, he is just beginning to analyze his brother when the manuscript breaks off.

As one might expect in a schoolboy's novel, the autobiographical elements are obvious. Selchurch is recognizably Lancing; Peter Audley and Ralf are, like the Waughs, five years apart; Moira Gage, as far as the story goes attached to neither brother, is modeled on Barbara Jacobs, though Moira is made Peter's contemporary rather than two or more years his senior. Waugh does relocate the family home from Hampstead to “the Hall” at Bulfrey Combe, a small rural village, and he makes Peter and Ralf three years older than the Waugh brothers.

Some Waugh critics would no doubt attribute the last two modifications of fact to Evelyn's desire to present his alter ego as more mature and more highly placed socially, but the fragment is remarkable because it is far less self-aggrandizing than exploratory. There is not much evidence from which to infer Waugh's attitude toward the setting because very little of the surviving manuscript is set in Bulfrey and the characters never reach Bulfrey Combe. Judging from the contrast between Bulfrey Combe, which “still kept most of the appearance of a country village,” and Bulfrey, “a small town with two or three streets of cheap shops, a bank, and a small glass factory which formed the nucleus of a large area of slum which was gradually spreading its grimy tentacles along the roads,” he was establishing the village as a refuge, already threatened, from the changes accelerated by the war. As the vicar's daughter, Moira was given a more stable background than Barbara Jacobs, whose parents battled over progressive versus traditional education as well as many other topics.

Waugh's motive for altering the ages of the chief characters was based more on social history than on personal aggrandizement. In March 1918, Evelyn was fourteen and a half; Peter is seventeen and a half for two reasons: first, to allow Waugh to place him at Selchurch in the summer term of 1914, so that he can contrast the opulence, ease, and intellectual distinction of that period with the privation, academic slackness, and war mania of 1918; second, so that Peter is faced with the immediate prospect of leaving school for the battlefront, and he knows and resents the fact that the Officer Training Corps (OTC) has not prepared him to function in that world. (One might compare Peter's reflections on the OTC exercise with Alastair Trumpington's and Cedric Lyne's experiences of maneuvers and battle in Put Out More Flags and Guy Crouchback's in Sword of Honour.) Furthermore, he is not at all sure that he can measure up to his brother's attitudes and accomplishments because “Ralf saw everything so abstractedly with such imperturbable cynicism. Peter flattered himself that he would not be able to stand it; Ralf had won the D.S.O. some months ago.”

Although Peter has begun to judge Ralf's witty utterances as calculated for effect, the fragment ends before Peter can assert himself as rival in war, love (note the effect of making Peter and Moira contemporaries), or words. What does emerge is a portrait of Lancing and by extension of English society which accords very closely with much of Waugh's editorial journalism in the Lancing College Magazine; in “The War and the Younger Generation” in 1928; by implication in Vile Bodies; and finally in A Little Learning: his generation had been denied the pleasures promised for their youth and frustrated in the possibility of testing themselves in battle. As Peter says, in an argument over discontinuing sports prizes to divert energy and attention to the war, “Everything has been done … to make school life excessively unpleasant. … What little of the old life does remain, is what keeps it just tolerable.” More seriously, Waugh, Peter, and their contemporaries, cast into a world where old values had been destroyed or corroded, were left to find their own. At no time in his life did Waugh have much confidence in the individual's ability to do so. In 1920, portraying a class of history students given no stimulation and anticipating no rewards, Waugh asserted that “Youth[,] far from being the time of burning quests and wild, gloriously vain ideals beloved of the minor poets, is essentially one of languor and repose.” The language is very similar to the passage in Brideshead Revisited which celebrates “The Languor of Youth,” “the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse.”³ However, the judgment is very different: in 1919 the languor is the result of slackness rather than the condition for spiritual fermentation. It was much easier to look back at 1922 than forward to it.

In 1920, Waugh could objectify in the war his fears of the adult world, his resentment of the system that was preparing him for it so badly, and his early, grudging respect and resentment of the elder brother who seemed to be winning the prizes—manhood, marriage, literary success—to which Evelyn aspired by means that he could not yet clearly imagine. Perhaps this is the real reason that the novel was never completed. However, Evelyn provided himself with more obvious means of escape from authorship. His first diary entries marvel at the amount of work involved—“each chapter will have to be about two sections of College bumph.” When he took home the manuscript for Christmas vacation, he found

Alec apprehensive of a rival, Mother of my ruin through becoming a public figure too soon. Father likes it. Meanwhile I plot on and on at it, trying to make it take some form or shape. At present it seems a mere succession of indifferently interesting conversations. However, I believe it is fairly good and I am pretty sure to be able to get it published. It's a bloody sweat, however.

(Diaries, 108)

Even the prospect of fame soon vanished because of “my family's disapproval and my own innate sloth,” and by 10 January 1921 he had abandoned the effort. It is also possible that he could not imagine what was to happen—to him as much as to his characters—and that, having outlined his social themes but finding himself unwilling to face even an imaginative rivalry with Alec, he welcomed the return to schoolboy status.

Twenty-five years later, Waugh found a more difficult if less complex transition to a very different kind of postwar world. Although, judging from his diaries and letters, he was not dissatisfied with the kind of man he had become, he exhibited considerable doubts about the kind of writer he was to be in the future. Early in the process of writing Brideshead (his hero was still named Peter at this stage) he speculated that it might be the first of his novels—by which he apparently meant the novel in the English realistic tradition—rather than his last. Two years later, he promised his readers that future work would be concerned with style and with the presence of God in the world of the novel. In 1945, while he was letting his war experiences settle into usable form and was perhaps unwilling to test his ability to deal with the postwar world, he began research for Helena. But the success of Brideshead made it unnecessary, even unwise, for him to work very hard, and four months after he first mentioned Helena he turned to his own past, reading “my Lancing diaries through with unmixed shame” and for the next month working on “a novel of school life in 1919—as untopical a theme as could be found” (Diaries, 636) After the diary entry made on his forty-second birthday, we hear no more of the story “Charles Ryder's Schooldays” until my Catalogue of the University of Texas materials in 1981 and the independent discovery of a carbon typescript at his agent's office later in the same year.

“Charles Ryder's Schooldays” begins the day after the first entry in Waugh's Lancing diaries; like them, it deals with resentment at the new appointments by and the very existence of a new house tutor. Unlike the diaries, the story presents the tutor's appeal to Ryder for cooperation and compassion and ends with Ryder's scorning apologies and offer of compensation from the man—with very much the same words Waugh recorded in A Little Learning. There is little consecutive action; there is a good deal of detail about the customs by which the boys stratify themselves.

There are at least three obvious and not always discrete ways of looking at the story: in the context of Brideshead, to which it forms a prequel; in the context of the Diaries, though I am more interested in style than in content; and in the context of the earlier school story as another attempt at self-creation. In the first context, Waugh's epigraph to Brideshead, “I am not I” and so on, clearly does not apply to the Charles Ryder of the story or, as B. W. Handford shows,⁴ to anyone else in it. First, Charles' experiences are drawn more directly from those of the youthful Waugh than at any other place in Waugh's fiction; second, because in the story there is no “I” because Waugh tells the story in third rather than first person. The two are very closely related, I think: Waugh wanted to use the mass of material, no doubt rediscovered as he was rearranging his life and his effects at Piers Court after a six-year absence, but he also wanted to distance himself as author and person not only from his abhorred earlier self but from the character of Ryder. As he must have come to recognize, along with a number of subsequent critics, the chief problem with Brideshead is that many perceptive and otherwise sympathetic readers regard Ryder as a very unpleasant character. However, it is not at all clear how far the author shares this view or is even aware of the possibility that someone might conceive it. This was a problem that no amount of revision of the text of the novel could resolve. By using third person, Waugh was able to set Ryder in a physical and social context rather than let him create and dominate it. In fact, Waugh uses setting in a much different way than he had in the 1920 fragment. There all was subordinated to Peter's viewpoint. Discomforts are imposed from without by the system. In “Charles Ryder's Schooldays,” the characters are dwarfed and dominated by the scene, the system is internalized, the boys oppressing each other and themselves by accepting and elaborating on a social code designed to regulate attitudes as well as behavior.

Besides third person, Waugh uses two other techniques to place and judge Ryder: in conversations among the boys, he does not include identifying tags, so that individual personality is shown to be submerged in schoolboy argot; and in diary entries by Ryder he shows the boy's immature habit of simplifying character and event into adolescent commonplaces. Compare, for example, the episode of the master—Gordon at Lancing, Graves at Spierpoint—and the printing press. In the Diaries, Waugh wrote:

In the afternoon, as it was raining, Fremlin and I returned early from our walk and helped Gordon to mend his printing press. It would be priceless to have one but they are rather costly. He invited us to tea and we sat round his fire talking scandal and eating toast till chapel. Perhaps he isn't really so bad after all.

(Diaries, 28)

In “Charles Ryder's Schooldays,” the press is at first merely mentioned and provides Charles—more wistful internally and more callous externally than the Waugh of the diaries—with daydreams of “the tall folios, the wide margins, the deckle-edged mould-made paper, the engraved initials, the rubrics and colophons of his private press” (296–297). Later the master enlists Ryder and Tamplin (clearly based on Fremlin) to help him assemble it. Tamplin escapes, but Charles remains to finish the job and Graves confides in him about O'Malley's need for Ryder's support as head of the dormitory. In Charles Ryder's diary for 28 September this is reuced to

After luncheon Tamplin and I were going for a walk when Graves called us in and made us help put up his printing press. Tamplin escaped. Graves tried to get things out of me about ragging Dirty Desmond but without success.

Charles cannot admit, in writing, in his official schoolboy self, his desire for a press, and he wilfully misunderstands the tutor's motives, as Waugh did not entirely do. Elsewhere, similar incidents are treated by Ryder as diarist in a more curt and simple fashion than in Waugh's diaries, where the level of vocabulary is far higher and the complexity of sentence structure far greater than in Ryder's diary:

I don't think we shall be able to rag Woodard long, but meanwhile we are making hay. He is trying to make us use the new pronunciation in Latin, and it is an endless source for supposed misunderstanding. We have also some splendid attempts such as SOOBYOONGTEEWAY for the pronunciation of Subjunctive. He got quite bored when, on his using the new pronunciation in Greek, his pronunciation was greeted with a longdrawn wail of oooh! He threatened to send us all to our House-masters, and I believe he will carry out the threat.

(Diaries, 20–21)

Peacock deigned to turn up for Double Greek. We mocked him somewhat. He is trying to make us use the new pronunciation; when he said oú there was a wail of “ooh” and Tamplin pronounced subjunctive soobyoongteeway—very witty. Peacock got bored and said he'd report him to Graves but relented.

[Ryder's entry, 25 September 1919]

And throughout the story, the contrast between Ryder's style and that of the omniscient narrator is even greater.

Of course, the diaries do not have a plot—though, to use E. M. Forster's distinction, they do have a story—and while the story did not progress far enough for a line of action to emerge, we can discern threads which would probably have been woven into a design that was in part dictated by events already mentioned in Brideshead. Chief among these is the death of Ryder's mother (here and in the manuscript of Brideshead killed by a German shell in Bosnia; in pre-1960 Brideshead dying of an unspecified cause; and in 1960 dying of exhaustion, perhaps to show her self-sacrifice in a way that death as a result of combat would not). Waugh must have recognized that Charles' response, or rather his lack of response, to his mother's death in Brideshead was inadequate, not merely in terms of Ryder's psychology but in novelistic terms, and by emphasizing in the story Charles' memory of the news and associating it with the Spierpoint setting, he may have been preparing to link her death with Charles' rejection of Spierpoint values, his outward callousness, and his inward refusal—unlike the youthful Waugh—to analyze himself or others. A second major theme is adumbrated in the series of models for young Ryder, especially the masculine and intellectual A. A. Carmichael, contrasted with the almost maternal and emotional Frank Bates as “that one the ineffable dweller on cloud-capped Olympus, this the homely clay image, the intimate of hearth and household, the patron of threshing-floor and olive-press.” Charles' worship of these deities, like the atheism or agnosticism of the Sixth Form, embodied most brilliantly in Symonds, who reads the Greek Anthology in chapel, is obviously intended to anticipate Charles' account of his irreligious background in Brideshead. Set between the two masters is Graves, who attempts to draw Ryder out of his contemptuous rejection of human responses. Even in the fragment he emerges not simply to illustrate a point but to stand as a complex character to set off rather than complement Charles' attitudinizing.

However, the complexity of character, especially in the conception and treatment of Charles, created what proved to be insuperable problems. For one thing, the Charles of Brideshead was much more reserved and sophisticated than the Waugh revealed in A Little Learning and other memoirs. The Ryder of the fragment, on the other hand, is far less sophisticated in style and general response and far less active intellectually and academically than the Waugh of the diaries—though, like the Ryder of Brideshead, he is a restaurant snob. Moreover, it does not seem possible that the rather cold and priggish Ryder of Spierpoint—however much he was beginning to reject conventional reactions—could have become the Oxonian “in search of love” who went to Sebastian's luncheon party “full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall … which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city” (Brideshead, 31). By attempting to use the harsh fact of what Waugh repeatedly felt to be caddishness, Waugh had blocked the way towards the nostalgia that is the older Ryder's most endearing quality. The “I” of Charles Ryder was not, and finally could never be, the “I” of Evelyn Waugh.

Alec Waugh believed that life could, in fact should, be lived in watertight compartments, and this dictum so impressed Evelyn that he used it in his diary, in both school stories, and at least by implication in A Little Learning. In fact, as I argued in Chapter 4, Waugh's acceptance of this belief found embodiment in the technique of his first five novels, where he used fragmentation, caricature, and discontinuity as major principles of selection and organization and distancing as a feature of characterization. If the method of the realist novel is, as various critics have argued, linked to liberal, humane values, and if Forster's “only connect” is a formal as well as a thematic principle, then Waugh was never in serious danger of becoming a realist, and the unwitting fragmentation of Charles Ryder in the story is evidence that he could not breach and perhaps not even formally recognize the gap. Various recent critics, including Ian Littlewood, have shown that he objectified conflicts rather than analyzing them.⁵

Perhaps, as is clearly the case in “Charles Ryder's Schooldays,” Waugh could not bring himself to deal directly with the causes of his own coldness and misanthropy. It is certain that he did not complete any serious attempt to portray anything like his own character, either in the schoolboy fragment Work Suspended or in “Charles Ryder's Schooldays.” Had he been able to do so, as J. B. Priestley argued in his review of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold,⁶ he might have been able to cure himself. At least he might have been able, as he never was in art or, as far as one can tell, in life, to imagine himself in a realistic mode. We cannot know, and probably he would have doubted, whether this was a Good Thing. If so, he would not have sought the methods of displacement and deflection that make him one of the most original novelists and master stylists of his generation. But then art is art, not therapy, and the fragments and failures are much less important, and finally less vital, than the completed fictions created by an incomplete man.

Notes

1. The text of the story, titled “Fragment of a Novel,” is printed in Evelyn Waugh, Apprentice, ed. Robert Murray Davis (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1985).

2. Work Suspended and Other Stories, Including Charles Ryder's Schooldays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). “Charles Ryder's Schooldays” has an introduction by Michael Sissons.

3. Brideshead Revisited (Boston: Little, Brown, 1946), p. 79.

4. Times Literary Supplement, 9 April 1982, p. 412.

5. Ian Littlewood, The Writings of Evelyn Waugh (Totowa, N. J.: Barnes & Noble, 1982). Though in no sense a work of scholarship, this book contains isolated insights about Waugh's style.

6. J. B. Priestley, “What Was Wrong with Pinfold,” New Statesman, 54 (31 August 1957), 244.