SOURCE: “Decline and Fall: ‘Grimes, You Wretch!’” in From Grimes to Brideshead: The Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh, Bucknell University Press, 1990, pp. 37–57.

[In the following excerpt, Garrett explores the nature of the humor in Decline and Fall, praising Waugh's use of language and narrative structure.]

In September 1927, staying with his parents at Underhill and still working on Rossetti, Waugh observed in his diary: “How I detest this house and how ill I feel in it. The whole place volleys and thunders with traffic. I can't sleep or work. I … have begun on a comic novel.”¹ Sometime later he read the first ten thousand words to Anthony Powell, and at some point he read the early chapters to Dudley Carew as well:

What he read to me that night, sitting in the chair where Arthur was wont to proclaim that beautiful Evelyn Hope was dead, were the first fifty or so pages of Decline and Fall. A happiness, a hilarity, sustained him that night, and I was back giving him my unstinted admiration as I did at Lancing. It was marvellously funny and he knew that it was. As was his habit in those old, innocent days, he roared with laughter at his own comic invention.²

According to Powell, the novel was originally called Picaresque: or the Making of an Englishman. But, Powell recalled, “Some months after the reading aloud of these chapters—probably a moment towards the end of the same year—I asked Waugh how the novel was progressing. He replied: ‘I've burnt it.’”³ He had not, in fact, but by November the manuscript seems to have been set aside and then ignored until after Christmas.

The later chapters advanced slowly. Early in the new year he wrote to Harold Acton: “The novel does not get on. I should so much value your opinion on whether I am to finish it.”⁴ Once again, as with “The Temple at Thatch,” he seems to have been ready to defer to Acton's critical judgment. In this case, however, Acton claims to have been enthusiastic about the manuscript. A draft of the novel was complete in April, but, worried about its length, Waugh wrote to Powell, who was working at Duckworth:

I hope the novel will be finished in a week. I will send it to you as soon as it is typed & then want to revise it very thoroughly and enlarge it a bit. I think at present it shows signs of being too short. How do these novelists make their books so long. I'm sure one could write any novel in the world on two post cards.⁵

In May he submitted the manuscript to Duckworth, where it was rejected on “the odd grounds of its indelicacy” (Waugh later wrote), with demands for alterations he declined to make.⁶ Chapman and Hall soon accepted the novel but also stipulated some bowdlerizing changes. This time Waugh acceded, and Decline and Fall was published in September 1928, subtitled An Illustrated Novelette.

The facetious subtitle announced the novel's modest pretensions. As far as Waugh was concerned, it was a potboiler; weightier literary work might come later, but at the moment he needed money to get married. It also was something in the nature of an inside joke designed to amuse friends, for whom he inserted private allusions ranging from the Christian names of his two closest friends, Alastair and Olivia, to the surname of his detested Hertford tutor, Cruttwell. The names of two derisory minor characters so closely resembled those of two young men of Waugh's acquaintance that in the second printing new names were prudently substituted. The names of other friends and acquaintances had already been edited out in manuscript. The ideal reader was a recent Oxonian with Waugh's own aristocratic predilections and schoolmastering experience—someone like John Betjeman, for example. Perhaps swayed by the dedication to himself, even Harold Acton signified his approval; Waugh replied in acknowledgment: “I am glad to think it amused you a little. Anyway I enjoyed writing it which is more than I can say about Rossetti.”⁷ Fearing, however, that it might be damaging for a serious man of letters, or art critic, or whatever he might become, to have a comic novel in his canon, Waugh considered publishing it (Alec Waugh recalled) under a pen name.

Yet Decline and Fall's comic accomplishment owed much to its lack of artistic ambition. Aside from urgent practical motives, Waugh's chief stimulus was playfulness, for in writing the novel he was burlesquing his own recent experience. He did not write it carelessly or in a spirit of holiday levity; he was serious about the novel, but he knew the novel itself was not a serious thing.

The challenge Waugh set himself was to exploit the comic potential of his material, “that the texture of life should be made to yield a comic response.” Unlike life, which could be and in Waugh's case often was refractory and disheartening, language was something he could control and manipulate with confidence and élan; living was a skill he had not mastered, but writing was a game he could play well and one that yielded satisfying consolation when played successfully. Much of the “meaning” of Decline and Fall lies simply in its deployment of language to achieve comic effect. In this first novel, Waugh achieved a concentration of comic style that he never really surpassed; Decline and Fall had no broad artistic ambitions or thematic motives to divert him from comic play or to persuade him to defer immediate effects for larger purposes. The page in hand was everything; the next page would take care of itself. His ambition was straightforward; as he insisted at the very beginning, “IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY.”

Comic density and intensity were the goal; consistency was not a dominating concern. Waugh readily sacrificed consistency in tone, point of view, satire, or rhetoric if immediate comic impact could be gained by doing so. At one point, grandiloquent parody might serve the purpose, while in the next paragraph it might be severe understatement and, in the next paragraph yet, flagrant hyperbole; or he might at one point adopt the perspective of one of his characters, then a few sentences later suddenly step back from the same character with bland indifference. Behind all such variations, however, is a principle of understatement and precision, and Decline and Fall's comic tone is based on a continual tension between the skillfully controlled language of the narration—selective, concise, lucid, exact, reticent (usually)—and the freewheeling, idiosyncratic energy of the novel's characters.

Playing with language meant, for Waugh, not primarily wit (he seldom played with words in the sense of puns or double entendres, for example) or elaboration, but sharpness and compression: packing the most significance into the fewest words. One of his gifts was finding the strikingly apt word or phrase; he preferred a single, well-aimed shot to a fusillade. But this effort of precise and accurate diction was part of a larger goal. Whether understating with clipped brevity or launching into mock grandiloquence, his object was to assert control over his material, and by extension over life, with skillfully deployed comic rhetoric. Near the beginning of Decline and Fall, for example, there occurs an often cited passage describing the annual Bollinger Club dinner:

… from all over Europe old members had rallied for the occasion. For two days they had been pouring into Oxford: epileptic royalty from their villas of exile; uncouth peers from crumbling country seats; smooth young men of uncertain tastes from embassies and legations; illiterate lairds from wet granite hovels in the Highlands; ambitious young barristers and Conservative candidates torn from the London season and the indelicate advances of debutantes; all that was most sonorous of name and title was there for the beano.

(13–14)

The passage is an adjectival extravagance, but scarcely an uncontrolled one: the rhetorical force of the description springs from the strong vocabulary and the carefully measured, rhythmically orotund sequence of balanced parallel phrases, alliterated almost like Old English prosody, building to the slangy anticlimax, “beano.”⁸ Though a long sentence, it has the effect of compression. Its comic force derives not simply from the jocular rhetorical deflation at the end, but even more from the mismatch between the promiscuous diversity of the Bollinger membership and the nicely calculated order and diction of their description.

Constantly crowded against this precise, controlled narrative voice is the spontaneous, quirky energy of the novel's characters. The narrator does not describe them; the characters describe themselves by their speech. We meet Lady Circumference, for example, talking to Paul Pennyfeather and Doctor Fagan about her son Lord Tangent:

The boy's a dunderhead. If he wasn't he wouldn't be here. He wants beatin’ and hittin' and knockin' about generally, and then he'll be no good. That grass is shockin' bad on the terrace, Doctor; you ought to sand it down and resow it, but you'll have to take that cedar down if you ever want it to grow properly at the side. I hate cuttin' down a tree—like losin' a tooth—but you have to choose, tree or grass; you can't keep'em both. What d'you pay your head man?

(81)

It is not psychological depth or complexity or even plausibility that Waugh was interested in extracting from the figure of Lady Circumference, but her “comic texture”—idiosyncratic character expressed in uninhibited, slangy speech. Though the vitality of the character is likely to attract a reader's sympathy (and Waugh's as well, I think), the narrative voice itself remains formally uncommitted and unappreciative.⁹ Another passage, chosen more or less at random, will show some of the main features of Decline and Fall's comic grammar:

Ten men of revolting appearance were approaching from the drive. They were low of brow, crafty of eye and crooked of limb. They advanced huddled together with the loping tread of wolves, peering about them furtively as they came, as though in constant terror of ambush; they slavered at their mouths, which hung loosely over their receding chins, while each clutched under his ape-like arm a burden of curious and unaccountable shape. On seeing the Doctor they halted and edged back, those behind squinting and mouthing over their companions' shoulders.

“Crikey!” said Philbrick. “Loonies! This is where I shoot.”

“I refuse to believe the evidence of my eyes,” said the Doctor. “These creatures simply do not exist.”

(78)

Here the narrative voice initially seems to share the perspective of Doctor Fagan and Philbrick as they view with alarm the advancing musicians (as they turn out to be). Satire on the Welsh is a recurrent amusement in the early chapters of Decline and Fall; the particular tactic here is an extended metaphor crowding together vivid zoo and madhouse images in a series of rhythmic and balanced phrases and sentences. Scarcely a word fails to contribute to the joke, the smooth urbane mastery of language by itself creating an ironic contrast to the Welsh provincials.

But with the switch from description to dialogue, the narrative voice at once recedes from the perspective of Doctor Fagan and Philbrick to a more remote vantage point, which surveys the musicians, Fagan, and Philbrick from roughly the same ironic distance. From this perspective, the latter are no longer privileged observers but comic objects themselves, with Philbrick's emphatic vernacular and dramatic, crudely violent impulse posed against the suave ironic incredulity of Doctor Fagan. Their responses reveal their humors, and the juxtaposition of their clashing humors is the comic point. This single short passage thus contains several characteristic … of Decline and Fall's comic grammar: the concentration and marshalling of vivid language; the willingness, even eagerness, to shift point of view if the shift will augment the immediate comic effect; dialogue recorded without comment to display quirks of individual character and their comic confrontation.

Another passage shows some of the same methods. The subject is Margot Beste-Chetwynde's and Paul Pennyfeather's projected wedding:

Society was less certain in its approval, and Lady Circumference, for one, sighed for the early nineties, when Edward Prince of Wales, at the head of ton, might have given authoritative condemnation to this ostentatious second marriage.

“It's maddenin' Tangent having died just at this time,” she said “People may think that that's my reason for refusin'. I can't imagine that anyone will go.”

“I hear your nephew Alastair Trumpington is the best man,” said Lady Vanbrugh.

“You seem to be as well informed as my chiropodist,” said Lady Circumference with unusual felicity, and all Lowndes Square shook at her departure.

(176)

This passage is often cited for its shockingly casual disclosure of little Tangent's death, but its comic grammar is more complex. The first paragraph, with its mock deference to the notion of Society, Lady Circumference's nostalgia for Victorian decorum, the French “ton,” and the polysyllabic formality, momentarily establishes an elevated style of discourse and manners, in order to prepare for the sharp contrast of Lady Circumference's blunt style and savage insensitivity. Her rejoinder to Lady Vanbrugh's feline comment further compresses several comic elements: the countess gossiping with a chiropodist; the unusual and ambiguous authorial comment—“with unusual felicity”; the mock-heroic cliché “shook at her departure,” applied absurdly to the aristocratically fashionable Lowndes Square. What ties all the techniques and jokes together is the play with language to achieve immediate and striking comic effect.¹⁰

Waugh was also playing with recent personal history.

The book Waugh had in mind when he began writing was a burlesque of his schoolmastering experience, especially his initiation into schoolmastering at Arnold House in North Wales. “The Balance,” too, had sprung from his misery in Wales, but having escaped Wales, freed himself from schoolmastering, and reconciled himself to Olivia Greene's romantic indifference by the time he began writing Decline and Fall, he could look back on his griefs at Arnold House with greater emotional detachment and with a greater appreciation of their comic aspect. As Paul Pennyfeather, sitting comfortably in a London restaurant with his equally conventional Oxford friend Potts, reflects on his experience at Llanabba, it all seems a phantasmagoric aberration: “Llanabba Castle, with its sham castellations and preposterous inhabitants, had sunk into the oblivion that waits upon even the most lurid of nightmares” (145). In 1927, Waugh's own perspective on Arnold House was comparable, and Decline and Fall exaggerates the bad-dream metaphor into Alice in Wonderland dislocation, combining his departure from Oxford and his exile in Wales to create a myth of unheroic descent into a bizarre scholastic underworld, a purely comic Dotheboy's Hall. Beneath all the exaggerations and inventions of the novel, Paul's history follows a pattern similar to Waugh's: banishment from the agreeably sheltered life of an Oxford undergraduate, followed by a plunge into a strange and unsettling new world. Waugh's descent from Oxford to Arnold House provided the original comic impetus of Decline and Fall.

Although Decline and Fall parodies Waugh's experience, Paul Pennyfeather is not a close self-portrait of Waugh himself. A studious, mild-mannered undergraduate leading a blamelessly dull life, Paul is entirely unacquainted with Waugh's bohemian, pleasure-loving Oxford; he has certainly never visited the Hypocrites, and the circumstances of his expulsion from the University scarcely resemble Waugh's routinely unsuccessful departure. But Paul's middle-class background deliberately echoes Waugh's. Paul arrived at the University “after a creditable career at a small public school of ecclesiastical temper on the South Downs, where he had edited the magazine, been President of the Debating Society, and had, as his report said, ‘exercised a wholesome influence for good’ in the House of which he was head boy” (15–16)—very much like Waugh at Lancing. The difference between Paul and Waugh is that Paul seems hardly to have changed at Oxford; he seems, in fact, modeled on Waugh not as he departed from Oxford in 1924, but as he arrived from Lancing two and a half years earlier: spending his early months at Hertford quietly, reading and daydreaming, eating in hall, taking walks by himself in the country, making few friends; on Waugh as he might have remained but for the Hypocrites and Harold Acton. In ridiculing Paul's quiet sobriety, Waugh was mocking one possible version of himself. Not long before writing Decline and Fall, he had interviewed to become an Anglican clergyman; was there in Waugh the stuff of a placid suburban vicar?

Paul's relation to Waugh is thus ambiguous, partly autobiographical, partly antithetical. Although sometimes derisively conventional and dull-witted, polite to a fault, Paul is at other times a sympathetic figure—decent, ingenuous, abused, but uncomplaining. In this latter aspect he caricatures the unassuming, unlucky hero of Waugh's diaries, a semifictional character Waugh had been developing across the years for his own consolation and diversion. Paul Pennyfeather is such a diffident and unassertive hero that it is easy to overlook his importance to Decline and Fall and to Waugh's subsequent fiction. The buffeted, baffled, unworldly hero, of which Paul was the prototype, enabled Waugh to maintain an ironically detached perspective on his own experience and even on himself; self-caricature prevented self-absorption and self-pity. Paul Pennyfeather might take himself seriously, but Waugh can laugh at him; and in thus comically distancing himself from his protagonist, Waugh opened up to himself all the comic possibilities of his own experience, painful as it may have been at the time. The virtue of the reticent Pennyfeatheresque hero is amply demonstrated by his absence in Work Suspended and Brideshead Revisited, in which discursive first-person narration involved Waugh in unprecedented difficulties.

Waugh had a rough plot idea when he began writing—to follow Paul Pennyfeather's descent from Oxford to Llanabba—but Decline and Fall soon became improvisational, especially as the action began to move away from its autobiographical origins. Even in the novel's early chapters, when he was still drawing material from his schoolmastering experience, Waugh seems to have let the plot develop as his daily inspiration directed, picking up and incorporating stray and unconnected bits of material as he wrote. The figure of Lady Circumference, for example, was closely modeled on Alastair Graham's mother, with whom Waugh was already well acquainted. But as he wrote some of the novel's early chapters he happened to be staying at her Warwickshire house, and the erratic hospitality he enjoyed there gave him immediate material and perhaps motive for sketching Lady Circumference's character. For example, as a friend of Alastair's who had often visited Barford before, Waugh was considered not so much a guest as a member of the household, and Mrs. Graham expected him to pull his own weight:

This morning there was great trouble with a large truculent under-gardener who is under notice to go and will not allow his successor to use his cottage. Mrs. G.: “Here am I left without a man in the house”—looking hard at me—“if Hugh were alive he'd have kicked him out.”¹¹

This incident must have been fresh in Waugh's mind when he introduced this exchange into the novel:

“… Greta, Mr Pennyfoot knows Alastair.”

“Does he? Well, that boy's doing no good for himself. Got fined twenty pounds the other day, his mother told me. Seemed proud of it. If my brother had been alive he'd have licked all that out of the young cub. It takes a man to bring up a man.”

“Yes,” said Lord Circumference meekly.

(83)

While this sort of extemporaneous borrowing helped to fill in the novel's first half, it became the governing method of the later chapters, when the novel wandered far beyond its original field of action.

By about the middle of Decline and Fall as it now stands, Waugh seems to have exhausted his schoolmastering experience, and from that point the novel grows remote from his personal history. As he resorted to other sources for material, his inventions became more exotic. His personal experience was limited in range, but he gathered scraps of material from here and there, piecing together current newspaper topics, gossip, sightseeing snapshots, and various of his own private interests. Margot Beste-Chetwynde's and Grimes's involvement in prostitution, for example, as well as Potts's sleuthing, was prompted by the well-publicized release in December 1927 of a League of Nations report on international white slave traffic. He set Margot's villa on Corfu because he had been impressed by the amenity of the island during a very brief stop there the year before, returning from a visit to Alastair Graham in Greece. Because its sources were eclectic, the second half of Decline and Fall grew more diffuse, topical, episodic, and peripatetic than the first half, and threatened to veer off into random satiric adventures.

Fortunately, however, by the time the autobiographical inspiration flagged, a new and accidental influence—Captain Grimes—had already begun to channel the novel's energies in a new direction. Grimes was modelled on one of Waugh's colleagues at Arnold House. “Young, the new usher, is monotonously pederastic and talks only of the beauty of sleeping boys,” he noted in his diary a few weeks into his second term.¹² Young nonetheless proved a convenient drinking companion, and one evening as they drank together, he divulged some highlights of his personal history:

… Young and I went out and made ourselves drunk and he confessed all his previous career. He was expelled from Wellington, sent down from Oxford, and forced to resign his commission in the army. He has left four schools precipitately, three in the middle of the term through his being taken in sodomy and one through his being drunk six nights in succession. And yet he goes on getting better and better jobs without difficulty.¹³

Waugh was greatly impressed by the narrative, “all very like Bruce and the spider.” Several years later, with military rank and a wooden leg, Young became Grimes; and then, without, it seems, any clear intention on Waugh's part, Captain Grimes grew into the hero of Decline and Fall, the embodiment of the novel's sympathy with impulsiveness and anarchy.

On his first entrance Grimes appears an unlikely hero: “The door opened, and a very short man of about thirty came into the Common Room. He had made a great deal of noise in coming because he had an artificial leg. He had a short red moustache, and was slightly bald” (30). But when he discloses his history to Paul, his distinction emerges; he has a genius for falling “in the soup” and landing on his feet. Grimes is an emblem of spontaneity and irrepressibility; he is the weed poking up through the crack in the sidewalk. While his past more or less duplicates Young's, Grimes's powers of survival grow mythic. He cannot be extinguished. “I can stand most sorts of misfortune, old boy, but I can't stand repression,” he remarks to Paul in prison, shortly before escaping (230). He glides undaunted through embarrassment and disaster. Mr. Prendergast, diffident and timid, a foil to Grimes's insouciant recklessness, is tormented by “Doubts,” but as Grimes himself explains:

When you've been in the soup as often as I have, it gives you a sort of feeling that everything's for the best, really. You know, God's in His heaven; all's right with the world. I can't quite explain it, but I don't believe one can ever be unhappy for long provided one does just exactly what one wants to and when one wants to. The last chap who put me on my feet said I was “singularly in harmony with the primitive promptings of humanity”. I've remembered that phrase because somehow it seemed to fit me.

(45)

Grimes's revival in the second half of the novel, after apparently drowning, and his later escape from prison confirm his superhuman vitality. He becomes “one of the immortals,” “a life force”:

Sentenced to death in Flanders, he popped up in Wales; drowned in Wales, he emerged in South America; engulfed in the dark mystery of Egdon Mire, he would rise again somewhere at some time, shaking from his limbs the musty integuments of the tomb.

(232)

After this panegyric, Grimes's reappearance would be anticlimactic; and his role in the novel, though not his spirit, here comes to an end.

If the figure of Paul Pennyfeather suggests the pre-Oxford Waugh, Paul's encounter with Grimes is analogous to Waugh's experience with the Hypocrites. Unexpectedly, the reprobate Grimes has a wholly salutary influence on Paul. Sober, studious, unadventurous, Paul has led a wastefully narrow life at Oxford:

For two years he had lived within his allowance, aided by two valuable scholarships. He smoked three ounces of tobacco a week—John Cotton, Medium—and drank a pint and a half of beer a day, the half at luncheon and the pint at dinner, a meal he invariably ate in Hall. He had four friends, three of whom had been at school with him.

(16)

Paul's idea of nightlife is attending a meeting of the League of Nations Union to hear a paper on Polish plebiscites (“You talk as though all that were quite real to you,” Waugh once remarked, incredulously, to a friend discussing central European politics).¹⁴ After an evening of plebiscites, Paul retires to his rooms to read The Forsyte Saga, presumably Waugh's notion of respectable, dull reading, and smoke a pipe in solitude before bed. Imaginatively straitened by conventional ideas and personal inhibitions, Paul very much needs an infusion of Grimes's zest. “Paul had no particular objection to drunkenness—he had read rather a daring paper to the Thomas More Society on the subject—but he was consumedly shy of drunkards” (16). He is shy of life, in fact, academically cloistered and very unfamiliar with the exuberant variety and unpredictability of the world beyond Oxford, or even beyond his own small circle at Oxford, for he has never even heard of the aristocratic Bollinger Club, with its boisterous revelries.

After this bland closeted life at Oxford, Paul is astounded by Llanabba, whose inmates (except for Prendergast) are unreservedly eccentric. From a circle in which it is considered the height of daring to challenge a conventional opinion, even in an essay, Paul is dropped into a happy society of criminals and charlatans: Dr. Fagan with his absurd elegance, his fraudulent school, and his two horrible daughters; Philbrick the protean imposter; Grimes himself; and, superadded to the ordinary inhabitants, the Sports-day visitors, including the ill-matched pair of Lady Circumference, an earthy aristocrat in the Squire Western tradition, and Margot Beste-Chetwynde, the cosmopolitan adventuress, with her unexpected consort, the excitable Chokey. When all these characters assemble at the Sports, the conversation becomes a chaos of dissonant voices, representing in small scale the world of random and diverse human energies beyond Paul's straitened experience:

“I had such a curious conversation just now,” Lord Circumference was saying to Paul, “with your bandmaster over there. He asked me whether I should like to meet his sister; and when I said, ‘Yes, I should be delighted to,’ he said that it would cost a pound normally, but that he'd let me have special terms. What can he have meant, Mr Pennyfoot?”

“‘Pon my soul,” Colonel Sidebotham was saying to the Vicar, “I don't like the look of that nigger. I saw enough of Fuzzy-Wuzzy in the Soudan—devilish good enemy and devilish bad friend. I'm going across to talk to Mrs Clutterbuck. Between ourselves, I think Lady C. went a bit far. I didn't see the race myself, but there are limits. …”

“Rain ain't doin' the turnip crop any good,” Lady Circumference was saying.

“No, indeed,” said Mrs Beste-Chetwynde. “Are you in England for long?”

“Why, I live in England, of course,” said Lady Circumference.

“My dear, how divine!”

(94–95)

Even Prendergast gets drunk at the Sports and contributes with unwonted spirit, chatting volubly and shooting little Tangent in the foot. Though reticent and bemused, Paul is not unaffected. Llanabba's cheerful defiance of middle-class convention begins to erode the drab values he has brought with him from Onslow Square, school, and Oxford, and what begins as an awful ordeal turns into a liberating experience.

While Grimes best represents the spirit of Llanabba, another spirit beckons to Paul from Oxford: the ghost of his own past, embodied in the person of Arthur Potts, one of Paul's four friends. A monitory figure, Potts is what Paul was at Oxford, and what he might become. Potts, like Grimes, resembles one of Waugh's fellow ushers, in this case a certain Attwell whom Waugh knew briefly at Aston Clinton:

He was educated at King's School, Worcester, and retains a slight accent, and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he seems to have led the dullest life imaginable. He is very keen on education and I have only just begun to cure him of talking to me seriously about it. … He took a second in English Literature and is not wholly uneducated, but he has a mean and ill-digested mind with a sort of part rationalism and part idealism.¹⁵

Even down to the keenness on education, this describes Potts almost perfectly. Potts, for example, writes to Paul at Llanabba:

There is a most interesting article in the Educational Review on the new methods that are being tried at the Innesborough High School to induce co-ordination of the senses. They put small objects into the children's mouths and make them draw the shapes in red chalk. Have you tried this with your boys?

(57)

The absurdity of such rarefied theory in the context of Llanabba reveals the great gap between Paul's arid Oxford education and the more fruitful lessons of Llanabba. While Potts combines rationalistic theories with a horrible complacency (“Are your colleagues enlightened?”), Paul has encountered actual life—irrational, intractable, disruptive, immensely vigorous.

Like good and bad angels in a morality play, Potts and Grimes compete for Paul's soul. The lines of battle emerge from Alastair Trumpington's offer to compensate Paul for his expulsion from Oxford. Recognizing the offer as “a test-case of the durability of my ideals,” Paul deliberates conscientiously about whether to accept the money. The spirit of Grimes and Llanabba urges Paul to cast off his scruples. Even Prendergast counsels common sense: “My dear boy, it would be a sin to refuse” (55). On the other hand, the spirit of Potts whispers in Paul's ear, priggishly:

If I refuse, I shall be sure of having done right. I shall look back upon my self-denial with exquisite self-approval. By refusing I can convince myself that, in spite of the unbelievable things that have been happening to me during the last ten days, I am still the same Paul Pennyfeather I have respected so long.

(55)

The alternatives are clear—and Paul not surprisingly chooses Potts, explaining to Grimes: “I'm afraid you'll find my attitude rather difficult to understand. … It's largely a matter of upbringing” (55). But the significance of the incident lies not in Paul's characteristic decision nor even, really, in Grimes's equally characteristic intervention—wiring Potts in Paul's name to send the twenty pounds—but in Paul's unexpected reaction when Grimes confesses that he has done so. Against all his upbringing and education, Paul is delighted: “‘Grimes, you wretch!’ said Paul, but, in spite of himself, he felt a great wave of satisfaction surge up within him. ‘We must have another drink on that’” (56). Potts, “something of a stinker,” as Grimes astutely infers, writes in response: “I cannot pretend to understand your attitude in this matter” (56–57); but Paul has been liberated from the puritan self-righteousness of Potts and initiated into the more tolerant ethos of Llanabba:

“To the durability of ideals,” said Paul as he got his pint.

“My word, what a mouthful!” said Grimes; “I can't say that. Cheerioh!”

(56)

Free-spirited and impulsive, Grimes has defeated Potts—at least for the moment.

Paul's Llanabba has become the equivalent of Waugh's Oxford—not the insipid Oxford of Potts, but the sparkling Oxford of Harold Acton and the Hypocrites.

The Grimesian spirit governs Decline and Fall, but not without a murmur of dissent here and there, and particularly in the somewhat digressive chapter on the background of King's Thursday, which Waugh added in revision to help fill out the book.

This chapter focuses on Margot Beste-Chetwynde's Hampshire country house, the modernistic creation of one Otto Silenus, whose name recalls the book about Silenus (“a Falstaff forever babbling o' green fields”) that Waugh had projected in 1925. The Silenus of Decline and Fall, however—mechanistic and indeed scarcely human—has little to do with Falstaff or green fields. A satiric allusion to the functionalist, factory-inspired “international style” creeping into England in the 1920s from Germany, Silenus combines the “significant form” aesthetics of Clive Bell and Roger Fry with the technocrat's passion for efficiency:

The problem of architecture as I see it … is the problem of all art—the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men. I do not think it is possible for domestic architecture to be beautiful, but I am doing my best. All ill comes from man. … Man is never beautiful; he is never happy except when he becomes the channel for the distribution of mechanical forces.

(142)

The unruly inefficiency of human energy saddens him:

“I suppose there ought to be a staircase,” he said gloomily. “Why can't the creatures stay in one place? Up and down, in and out, round and round! Why can't they sit still and work? Do dynamos require staircases? Do monkeys require houses?”

(144)

And Silenus himself hums with turbo-electric energy, recharging as he lies sleepless at night, “… his brain turning and turning regularly all the night through, drawing in more and more power, storing it away like honey in its intricate cells and galleries, till the atmosphere about it became exhausted and vitiated and only the brain remained turning and turning in the darkness” (152). Rationalist and utilitarian, puritanically unornamented, the international style asserted values profoundly inimical to Decline and Fall's celebration of spontaneity, diversity, and quirkiness—the Grimesian virtues. Gropius's leading academic champion, Nikolaus Pevsner, several years later summarized the ideological implications of the new architecture:

The profound affinity of this modern enthusiasm for planning (architectural as well as political) with the style of Gropius's Fagus factory is evident. The forms of the building reveal the mind of an artist but also of a concentrated thinker. … The warm and direct feelings of the great men of the past have gone; but then the artist who is representative of this century of ours must needs be cold, as he stands for a century cold as steel and glass, a century the precision of which leaves less space for self-expression than did any period before.

However, the great creative brain will find its own way even in times of overpowering collective energy, even with the medium of the new style of the twentieth century which, because it is a genuine style as opposed to a passing fashion, is totalitarian.¹⁶

A manifesto not greatly unlike Waugh's parody, but Pevsner wrote in earnest admiration, and the terms of his praise unmistakably suggest that there will be no place for someone like Grimes in the brave new world of the international style.

The new King's Thursday's chilly modernity contrasts sharply with the exaggerated backwardness of the old house, and it is in sketching the background of the original King's Thursday that Waugh's reservations about Grimesian anarchy emerge.

As part of his field researches for Rossetti, Waugh visited Kelmscott, William Morris's country house west of Oxford, shortly after he began writing Decline and Fall. A gabled Elizabethan manor house of Cotswold stone, sitting snugly within a small enclosed garden, Kelmscott stands, still relatively isolated, among meadows flanking the upper Thames. Surprised by Kelmscott's compactness, Waugh wondered how it could have accommodated Morris's large household: “The rooms are very low and dark and the whole effect rather cramped and constricted. We could not conceive how so many people lived there.”¹⁷ The diminutive scale was a characteristic disappointment—“I had imagined it all so spacious”—for someone who preferred the grand scale of Brideshead. But during his study of Rossetti Waugh had developed a sympathetic appreciation of Morris's values and the little estate where Morris “found sacramentally embodied all that he held of high account of beauty and sweetness and dignity,” as Waugh observed in Rossetti. “Here, in small compass, lay everything for which his art and his work was striving—peace, fellowship, love, childhood, beauty, simplicity, abundance” (183–84), Waugh wrote; then he quoted a character in Morris's utopian fantasy News From Nowhere, which concludes with a journey up the Thames to a house based on Kelmscott: “O me! O me! How I love the earth and the seasons and weather, and all things that deal with them, and all that grows out of them—as this has done” (184).

As Waugh thought about the sort of chic house suitable for Margot Beste-Chetwynde, Kelmscott seems to have come to mind as the exact antithesis to her turbulent modern spirit. Paul Pennyfeather first arrives at King's Thursday on a pleasant spring day:

The temperate April sunlight fell through the budding chestnuts and revealed between their trunks green glimpses of parkland and the distant radiance of a lake. “English spring,” thought Paul. “In the dreaming ancestral beauty of the English country.” Surely, he thought, these great chestnuts in the morning sun stood for something enduring and serene in a world that had lost its reason and would so stand when the chaos and confusion were forgotten? And surely it was the spirit of William Morris that whispered to him in Margot Beste-Chetwynde's motor-car about seed-time and harvest, the superb succession of the seasons, the harmonious interdependence of rich and poor, of dignity, innocence and tradition?

(148)

But such sentiments prove inept when the house itself bulks into view, for the venerable old King's Thursday, “enduring and serene,” has been demolished and replaced by the creation of Otto Silenus.

The old King's Thursday was absurdly backward, but for all its absurdity it preserved certain William Morris values to which Waugh responded sympathetically:

The estate-carpenter, an office hereditary in the family of the original joiner who had panelled the halls and carved the great staircase, did such restorations as became necessary from time to time for the maintenance of the fabric, working with the same tools and with the traditional methods, so that in a few years his work became indistinguishable from that of his grandsires.

(137–38)

Waugh's reading of Morris and his admiration for a well-cut dovetail here converged, products respectively of Rossetti and of his own recent carpentry lessons.

But such calm and stability do not prosper in the modern world as it is imagined in Decline and Fall. Governed by random, violent energy, that world resents the quiet enjoyment of life wherever such tranquillity might be lurking. When the slow-moving Pastmasters abandon King's Thursday, Margot Beste-Chetwynde quickly razes it, capriciously and perversely considering the rare old house common: “I can't think of anything more bourgeois and awful than timbered Tudor architecture” (140) (“I find that I am beginning to detest Elizabethan architecture owing to the vulgarities of Stratford-on-Avon,” Waugh had written in his diary).¹⁸ The image of Margot knocking down the old King's Thursday suggests Waugh's conflicting impulses: he was sympathetic with both the reckless impulsiveness of Margot and the quieter values enshrined in the old house, but in 1928 he was much more deeply enchanted with Margot.

A decade later, Waugh was mourning the demolition of many of London's old houses, but Decline and Fall is scarcely touched by such tender sentiments. The half-hearted attempt of Jack Spire, editor of the London Hercules, to save King's Thursday is derisive:

Mr Jack Spire was busily saving St Sepulchre's, Egg Street (where Dr Johnson is said once to have attended Matins), when Margot Beste-Chetwynde's decision to rebuild King's Thursday became public. He said, very seriously: “Well, we did what we could,” and thought no more about it.

(141)

Spire is a transparent allusion to J. C. Squire, who (Waugh thought) represented the folklore image of a merry-old, cricket-playing England that Waugh considered as spurious as modern timbered architecture. The Waugh of Decline and Fall scorned, or affected to scorn, sentimental wistfulness for preindustrial life, or at least for the quaint trappings of agrarian England. A year later he compiled a catalogue of what he considered antiquarian offenses:

… arts and crafts, and the preservation of rural England, and the preservation of ancient monuments, and the transplantation of Tudor cottages, and the collection of pewter and old oak, and the reformed public house, and the Ye Olde Inne and the Kynde Dragone and Ye Cheshire Cheese, Broadway, Stratford-on-Avon, folk dancing …

(Labels, 55–56)

and so on at great length. Under the guise of historical preservation, entrepreneurs traded on nostalgic sentimentality to spawn middle-class tourist “attractions.” Writing in 1929 in praise of the slums of Naples, he asserted: “In England, the craze for cottages and all that goes with them only began as soon as they had ceased to represent a significant part of English life. In Naples no such craze exists because the streets are still in perfect harmony with their inhabitants” (Labels, 56). The old King's Thursday harmonized with the indolent Pastmasters, who had never themselves arrived in the twentieth century, but the antiquarianism of people like Jack Spire or the Pastmasters' neighbors was self-indulgent, soft-boiled, dilettante:

“I thought we might go over to tea at the Pastmasters',” hostesses would say after luncheon on Sundays. “You really must see their house. Quite unspoilt, my dear. Professor Franks, who was here last week, said it was recognized as the finest piece of domestic Tudor in England.”

(138)

After calling on the Pastmasters, “they would drive away in their big motor-cars to their modernized manors” and sit “in their hot baths” (138). Perhaps this sort of weekend nostalgia was close enough to Waugh's own wistfulness to make him feel a little uncomfortable; perhaps Margot's wrecking ball was an oblique attack on his father's theatrical Victorian sentimentality. In any event, Decline and Fall does not go easy on nostalgia.

For all its confusion of grim factory style and splashy Art Deco—bottle-green glass floors and black glass pillars, malachite bath and kaleidoscopic drawing-room—Silenus's King's Thursday nonetheless represents the vital energy of the era. A “new-born monster to whose birth ageless and forgotten cultures had been in travail,” it is an architectural image of 1920s England. In 1928 Waugh was twenty-four years old, his appetite for experience was keen, and the “new-born monster,” despite its aesthetic horrors, represented the world as it lay before him. Despite his fond backward glance at the old King's Thursday of the Pastmasters, he confronted the contemporary world with high relish for its “vitality and actuality.” Decline and Fall's strongest sympathies are with the impulsive, anarchic energy of Grimes and Margot; and their impulse is to knock down old houses when the fancy strikes them.

From architecture Decline and Fall turns to other adventures: Margot's recruitment of prostitutes; Paul's trip to Marseilles; his arrest, trial, and conviction for abetting Margot's business; prisons; Paul's “death” at Dr. Fagan's bogus nursing home; his revival at Margot's villa at Corfu. Grimes turns up now and then in the later chapters, but Paul's continuing education is largely taken over by Margot. Wealthy, worldly, exquisitely elegant and fashionable, “the first breath of spring in the Champs-Elysées” (89), she is superficially very unlike the peg-legged, hand-to-mouth Grimes, but like Grimes she is spiritually anarchic, wholly amoral, beyond conventional standards of judgment. Although her restless energy leaves a wake of destruction, with Paul one of her victims, he easily forgives her; just as Grimes is one of the immortals, Margot too is a goddess. Neither can be confined by stone walls. Margot combines and burlesques two extremes, the criminal underworld and the high opulent style, spanning the novel's range of sympathies.

As Margot drives the action forward, Paul is pulled along behind. Though often baffling, his schooling in life continues, confirming and supplementing the lessons of Llanabba. Beyond the cramped circle of conventional respectability and neat academic theory to which he was previously limited, a multifarious and chaotic world flourishes. It can be ignored or condemned, but it refuses to be suppressed. The most spectacular collision between Grimes's and Potts's worlds is provoked by Sir Wilfrid Lucas-Dockery, the professorial prison warden whose enlightened reforms at Blackstone Prison, as irrelevant to actual prison conditions as Potts's educational ideas were to Llanabba, are dramatically refuted by the bloodthirsty visionary who decapitates Prendergast: a sad end for Prendergast, but a happy example of anarchy triumphant. Paul's passage through the underworld gives him the liberal education he was not getting at Oxford.

But Paul is not Grimes, nor was meant to be. At Llanabba, at King's Thursday, and in prison, he learns the limitations of his own background; but he can never quite escape it. His narrow, conventional self keeps surfacing. When Philbrick, for example, narrates one of his criminal fantasies, Paul responds indignantly: “‘But, good gracious,’ said Paul, ‘why have you told me this monstrous story? I shall certainly inform the police. I never heard of such a thing’” (70)—exactly what Potts would have said and done. Hopelessly naive about Margot Beste-Chetwynde's South American brothels, Paul travels to Marseilles, only to shrink from the crowded street life of the slums: “He turned and fled for the broad streets and the tram lines where, he knew at heart, was his spiritual home” (181). As he moves through the implausible events of the novel's latter half, he grows less censorious about the irregularities he encounters, but he can never really become a free spirit himself.

And in the end he returns to Oxford and to all appearances resumes the life he had led before his expulsion, reading divinity at Scone and bicycling to talks on Polish plebiscites, while a dull character named Stubbs replaces the dull Potts as his friend. After Paul's liberation from Potts at Llanabba, he seems to have fallen straight back into Potts's dreary milieu, a flagrant case of recidivism. But he actually belongs neither to Potts's nor to Grimes's world now, and instead stands aloof from both. Although his Oxford life is superficially unchanged, it has become a charade:

On one occasion he and Stubbs and some other friends went to the prison to visit the criminals there and sing part-songs to them.

“It opens the mind,” said Stubbs, “to see all sides of life. How those unfortunate men appreciated our singing!”

(247)

Paul doesn't answer; the gap between his varied experience of the world and Stubbs's complacent insularity is too wide to bridge. Though back in his old Oxford routine, Paul is no more at home at Oxford now than he had been at Llanabba. Outwardly occupied with his bland, studious routine and his circle of tedious acquaintances, Paul is nonetheless wiser and rather tougher now, aware of how much life pullulates beyond the smooth and tidy quadrangles of Scone. With this knowledge, there can be no genuine return to Potts.

Aware that Stubbs and Potts and their kind are his kind, however, and represent his future, he acts a deliberately chosen role, resigning himself to essay societies and cocoa, subduing his uneasy knowledge of his own futility, living at second hand in the passions of dusty theological controversies:

There was a bishop in Bithynia, Paul learned, who had denied the Divinity of Christ, the immortality of the soul, the existence of good, the legality of marriage, and the validity of the sacrament of Extreme Unction! How right they had been to condemn him!

(248)

Timid scholarly ferocity substitutes for any real engagement with life. The world boils with heterodox energy, with eccentrics and criminals, heretics and lunatics, with irrepressible weedlike vigor, but all that is outside and Paul has shut the door on it. Just beyond his rooms, in fact, the Bollinger Club is again partying noisily. Until the very last night of his first undergraduate career, Paul had never heard of the Bollinger, and if he had known of them he would have disapproved. Now, very much aware of them, he is neither sympathetic nor disapproving; but he does not want to get involved again, does not even want to be reminded of his earlier involvement with the Bollinger and all its consequences.

Peter Beste-Chetwynde, stumbling into his rooms, is a further reminder of the past, and Paul resents the intrusion. Peter is “dynamic” and Paul is “static”; Paul acknowledges this truth and disciplines himself to be content with his lot. When Peter leaves, Paul goes to bed—to sleep his life away, as it were, while others live theirs, awake.

Peter and Paul, in fact, both originate in Waugh himself. Peter is very drunk, but evidently more as a consequence of boredom than of celebration: “Oh, damn, what else is there to do?” he complains (252). Waugh too was sometimes a Bollinger in spirit, riotous and reckless; but he derived little solid comfort from his excesses, and, like Paul, he sometimes wanted to retreat, to close the door against the noisy outer world. Though bubbling throughout with comic effervescence, Decline and Fall ends on a subdued note of withdrawal.

The fruitless circularity of Paul Pennyfeather's experience, the uncertain mood of the ending, a series of playful religious and ecclesiastical allusions, and a knowledge of Waugh's later career—all these elements of the novel have, in some combination, led more than one critic to detect a deliberate and profound moral argument in Decline and Fall. Jerome Meckier, for example, finds the novel's meaning concealed in “symbolic shorthand”; in fact, “Symbols are always the key to Waugh's art.” With this in mind, Paul's circular experience can be seen as a modern parody of the fruitful cycle of the seasons and the sacred cycle of the Christian calendar, models that expose the futility of the contemporary secular world. Paul, then, is “a parodic Christ”; Philbrick the butler is a “bogus Messiah” whose fantastic autobiographical inventions are a parody of the Transfiguration; Prendergast is a “parodic martyr”; and so on.¹⁹

This is one way to read Decline and Fall, of course—anyone who puts out money for the book owns his own copy—but it seems a particularly pedantic and humorless reading, and one that certainly would have astounded Waugh himself; the furthest thing from his mind was an allegorical parody of secular society or a history of the moral decline of Christian civilization. Decline and Fall is a mythic transformation of intensely private experience into broad comedy: an amorphous lump of his own life moulded into aesthetically satisfying shape. It had very little to do with his politico-religio-moral ideology, whatever it may have been at the time. The wistful and despairing tone of the ending suggests the novel's roots in Waugh's unsettled feelings, the comic possibilities of life competing with, and consoling him for, painful experience.

But the governing spirit of the novel is not at all ambiguous. Decline and Fall belongs to Grimes and Margot and their fellows, the characters who live most dangerously and most fully:

Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.

Decline and Fall is vernal and youthful, eager for experience, in love with the living and the actual. It is the novel of a young man on the outside, familiar with disappointment but unscarred, inclined to wistfulness but brimming with inventiveness and anarchic zest. Waugh's comic genius never flourished more happily.

Notes

1. Diaries, 3 September 1927.

2. Dudley Carew, A Fragment of Friendship (London: Everest Books, 1974), pp. 81–82.

3. Anthony Powell, Messengers of Day, Vol. 2 of The Memoirs of Anthony Powell (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), p. 22.

4. To Harold Acton, undated (early 1928) (Letters, p. 25).

5. To Anthony Powell, 7 April 1928 (Letters, p. 27).

6. Preface to Decline and Fall, revised ed. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1962), p. 11.

7. To Harold Acton, undated (September/October 1928) (Letters, p. 28).

8. The comic rhetoric of this passage is discussed in detail in Walter Nash, The Language of Humour (London: Longman, 1985), pp. 22–25.

9. Jeffrey Heath, Picturesque Prison, warns against being seduced into liking Waugh's bad characters: “The discrepancy between the levels of action and parable creates an ambivalent tone of condemnation and compassion; as a result of this deceptive tone Waugh is able to ambush readers who mistakenly sympathize with characters whom he in fact deplores” (122). I think that this comment confuses fiction with life. Characters like Lady Circumference—based on the mother of Waugh's friend Alastair Graham—might be boring and awful as houseguests or neighbors and might even be morally deplorable; but they may be fascinating and even sympathetic characters in fiction, where they are aesthetic objects to which we respond with different standards. Replying, years after Decline and Fall, to an interviewer who mentioned fictional characters like Pistol and Moll Flanders, Waugh remarked: “Ah, the criminal classes. … They have always had a certain fascination.” To assert that the dramatic interest of Falstaff (to take another example) is that he demonstrates Shakespeare's disapprobation of robbery, cowardice, lying, lechery, and drunkenness not only would be banal, but would altogether mistake Shakespeare's, and our, attitude to Falstaff.

10. Good discussions of Waugh's comic style may be found in William J. Cook, Jr., Masks, Modes, and Morals: The Art of Evelyn Waugh (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971); and in Littlewood, Writings of Waugh, pp. 36–65.

11. Diaries, 2 October 1927.

12. Ibid., 14 May 1925.

13. Ibid., 3 July 1925.

14. Claud Cockburn, “Evelyn Waugh's Lost Rabbit,” The Atlantic, December 1973, p. 54.

15. Diaries, 8 February 1927.

16. Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1937), pp. 205–6.

17. Diaries, 6 October 1927.

18. Ibid., 11 September 1925.

19. Jerome Meckier, “Circle, Symbol and Parody in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall,” Contemporary Literature 20 (1979): 51–75.