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Decline and Fall
by Mike Stocks

1. The Annual Bollinger Dinner

Pennyfeather at his minor public school
had "exercised a wholesome influence";
but Pennyfeather, that is no defence
against the arrogance, the ridicule

of the rich, nor can your pedantic god
protect you from their fun--cycle back,
Pennyfeather, submit to the attack,
be divested of your trousers in the quad;

The Bollinger are baying for broken glass
and you, Pennyfeather, are transparently
that fragile window of the middle class
that must be smashed--by Lumsden of Strathdrummond,
by uncouth peers, by epileptic royalty,
and Sir Alastair Digby-Vane-Trumpington.

2. The Doubts of Mr Prendergast

Do you remember, Mr Prendergast,
those days when, as a clergyman in Worthing,
you sighed to see your privet hedge go curving
calmly to the rectory? The past,

Mr Prendergast, the past. . . . You went about
as bald and wigless as the days were long,
small boys never laughed and nothing went wrong
in the past until--presently--your Doubts.

What Doubts they were; not tedious abstractions
questioning the miracles, the fall,
the consecration of Archbishop Parker,

not trivial points, not Church of England factions,
but issues, Mr Prendergast, much darker--
why should God have made the world at all?

3. Captain Grimes Gets Married

No wonder that his loud I do rings plangent
when Flossie triumphs in her desperate search
and weds him in Llanabba Parish Church;
a foot is being removed from poor old Tangent,

while Clutterbuck is snivelling at the back
because there will be no more seedy walks
for both of them--not now Grimes' path has forked
from Procreation's chummy cul-de-sac.

But give him a week and then he will be free--
Grimes cares not for all the cosy lights
of hearth and home; Grimes prefers the drizzling rain,

the tragic note, the clothes piled by the sea.
His wife and Clutterbuck can sob all night,
but Grimes, in brand new togs, prefers the train.

4. Paul Pennyfeather at King's Thursday

The finest piece of Tudor in the land
swept clean away, and in its stead this
monstrous artificial edifice
that all the county set don't understand;

where once a timbered front rose proud above
the honest English earth is now this blight
of glass and tempered steel and vulcanite;
this house where Paul and Margot fall in love.

He may as well enjoy her while he can,
her charming vagueness, her exquisite ears,
her fragrant body with its flawless skin,

for as a William Morris sort of man
he'll come to grief in such a place. It's here
his strange Decline will end, and Fall begin.

Editor's Note: Mike Stocks edits Anon, a poetry magazine that uses an anonymous submissions selection procedure. Known and unknown poets are welcome to submit work.

What was Dial?
by David Bittner

     One of the most passionate speeches in Brideshead Revisited is made by Julia after Brideshead reproaches her for living in sin. I wondered, when Julia talked about putting her sin to sleep at night with a tablet of Dial because it was "fretful," what she was talking about. What, I wondered, was "Dial"?
     For an answer, I wrote to the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, and Mr. Mike Murphy, head of manufacturing and environment, replied promptly that Dial was the proprietary name for a preparation of allobarbital, a short-acting barbiturate drug that was previously used for sleep disorders. He said it was no longer used in medicine and referred me to the internet to find out more about it. What should I find but a 15-page essay on barbiturates, including allobarbital, which describes their usefulness in suicide attempts and their former popularity as sedative-hypnotics, until their effectiveness in suicide and high potential for addiction led to the introduction of safer substitutes. The essay was prepared by several individuals connected with the "suicide-holiday subculture," with humorous touches worthy of "You Might As Well Live," Dorothy Parker's famous poem about suicide, or The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh's famous novel about the American funeral industry, which includes the suicide of Aimée Thanatogenos.
     The piece includes helpful hints on how to "trick the docs" in our "suicidophobic" society, where we are "supposed to think seriously about everything except dying when we choose." It says, "Like, you can't expect them to believe you if you come out right away and tell them you want pills for sleep. You don't really believe that they will fall for such plainly facile trickery, do you? Rather, if you really want to have the means to die peacefully available to you, tell them you've been prescribed the drug." The authors go on, "Old docs are probably better than young docs. They wrote many prescriptions for barbs. Be inventive. Have a story ready."
     But, the article cautions, "Remember, the barbiturates are only potentially lethal. They aren't magic pills. You pop them, you drop dead. It ain't gonna work like that and leave you as stoned as a drunken dwarf. If you're discovered after you've taken them, chances are you will be saved. Hospital mortality rate is about 1-2 percent, mostly from complications that arise afterwards, such as renal failure and gangrene."
     Woe unto the man or woman whose suicide attempt has failed, says the article. "You may end up forcibly being hospitalized in a mental institution, being watched by other people. If they believe you were serious about suicide, you risk further violation of your privacy. If they believe you weren't serious, you risk being accused of hypocrisy."

A Note on Evelyn Waugh's Book Review 'Two Unquiet Lives'
by Peter Hayes

     'Two Unquiet Lives' (The Tablet, 5 May 1951, 356-7), Waugh's double review of the autobiographies of Stephen Spender and John Miller, is one of his most characteristic articles; it certainly contains one of his most frequently quoted barbs, the comparison of Spender's treatment of the English language to a chimpanzee's handling of a Sèvres vase. The second half of the review, devoted to Miller's book (Saints and Parachutes, London: Constable & Co., 1951), is equally funny and equally cruel, but a chance discovery raises the question of whether something more than ordinary 'Waughspishness' lay behind it.
     Waugh's chief target in this review is Miller's unorthodox spiritual development and opinions, which he treats with amused but withering scorn. Neither this nor anything else in the review presents any obvious puzzle, but researching the review for the sake of something entirely non-Waughian, I went to Miller's book to check a textual point and made two unexpected discoveries.
     I discovered that some of Waugh's quotations from the book are slightly inaccurate, but the first real point of interest came when I noticed that Miller, while an undergraduate at Oxford, had been taken on a holiday in France by 'C. R. Cruttwell' (30-4). Students of Waugh's life may be interested to read this first-hand account of Cruttwell as seen from a different perspective.
     This detail, in turn, led me to check the details of Miller's education, which I had passed over in skimming the book in search of Waugh's quotations from it. It turns out that Miller went up to Oxford in 1922, to Hertford College (29-30); the author targeted in Waugh's review, that is, was Waugh's exact contemporary at the same Oxford college.
     This raises a suggestion, at least, that Waugh's treatment of Miller's book may have been coloured by personal knowledge of the author--perhaps even by a long-held dislike of him. (Miller's status as a favourite of Cruttwell here serves only to deepen the mystery.) Whether or not Waugh remembered Miller from Oxford, he could not have read his book without being struck by their common history. That the review is silent as to this common history merely increases one's suspicions.
     The review, reread in this light, seems positively to avoid the subject. When Waugh sketches Miller's curriculum vitae, for example, he writes: 'Mr. Miller comes of Tory, Anglican, landed stock and learned the Classics at Rugby.' Yes, and also at Hertford College, Oxford, as the book makes clear, but as Waugh omits to add.
     Later in the review, Waugh writes: 'Top-hats were certainly rare in Oxford at that date.' He is writing here from personal knowledge; he is ideally placed to make such an observation, and at this point anyone else might have injected a personal note, to the effect that he knows this fact because he was there at the time. But, again, Waugh is silent.
     There may be nothing more to this than the avoidance of matters that Waugh regarded as irrelevant to his review. His silences must have been deliberate, though, whatever their motivation, and the puzzle remains. It would be interesting to see what annotations Waugh made, if any, in his review copy of Miller's book.

Reviews

Past and Present
Two Lives: Edmund Campion--Ronald Knox, by Evelyn Waugh. London: Continuum, 2001. 424 pp. £14.99. $41.95. Reviewed by Patrick Query.

     The publisher’s stated purpose in reissuing these two biographies by Waugh in one volume is modest and relatively straightforward: the books “in recent times…have been difficult to obtain…. The hope of the publishers is that this edition will restore to the general reader two works that are an essential part of the library of any admirer of Evelyn Waugh.”
     Still, Continuum has made an important critical choice in presenting these texts. And there is indeed quite a lot at stake for the Waugh reader who picks up Two Lives. The question of how to fit Waugh’s biographical works into the pattern of his oeuvre has long been an intriguing one, and at the Evelyn Waugh Centenary Symposium in La Rioja, Spain, Alain Blayac offered an elegant solution that is worth invoking here.
     Waugh’s biographies, said Professor Blayac, “are literature but also correspond to phases, stages in the biographer’s life, as if life did not precede writing but intimately depended upon it.”[1] The writing of biography afforded Waugh, the novelist, “new angles of vision and reflexion and allowed him to bring into play the intuitions he had, and challenged his ideas about art and philosophy.” A quick glance at Two Lives is enough to assure us that Continuum had something similar in mind. The cover looks more like a life of Waugh than a compilation of two lives by him: Waugh is pictured alone, his name above, “Two Lives” below, and the small words, “Edmund Campion • Ronald Knox” almost disappearing into the photo at the bottom.[2] The arrangement thus encourages the reader to think of these as works about the biographer first, and only then as works about his subjects.
     From this perspective, the reader of Edmund Campion notices how Waugh’s views about contemporary society inform his representation of Elizabethan England, and vice-versa. It is not difficult to see why Waugh, in 1935 recently converted to Catholicism himself and feeling increasingly isolated in a culture he saw as decadent and godless, found the story of the Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion, so appealing. The Elizabethan world, in which flesh-and-blood sacrifice was frequently the cost of adhering to the traditional, Roman Catholic faith, became for Waugh a bracing and clarifying precursor of his own historical moment. It is a connection Waugh makes clear in his 1946 Preface: “The haunted, trapped, murdered priest is our contemporary and Campion’s voice sounds to us across the centuries as though he were walking at our elbow” (5).
     Waugh was and is persecuted for his Catholicism, and his sacrifice took a form not unlike that of his next clerical biographical subject, and approximate contemporary, Ronald Knox (1888-1957). Like Waugh, Knox was a highly visible English convert to Catholicism, who had been as well known for his intellectual and creative powers as he would become for his faith. Similarities between the two men are evident early in Knox. The young Knox was, wrote Waugh, “a young man of the University clubs with their panelled rooms and mulled claret…rather than of the draughty public hall and the Party slogan,” a far cry, indeed, from the discipline of priestly orders (201). The fundamental conflict described in Knox is between worldliness and piety, also one of the distinguishing themes of Waugh’s own life. Waugh and his subject were good friends, and in his choice to entrust Waugh with the writing of his biography, Knox must have felt he was leaving his story in the hands of one who could understand it intimately.
     Even if we find Waugh at every turn in these lives of others, it need not diminish the merit of the works as biographies, albeit of very different kinds. Campion is, Waugh admitted, a novelistic biography. It was never intended to be an exhaustive, “complete, scholar’s work on the subject” (5). Rather, it distills Campion’s life to its dramatic essence and retells it with due attention to plot and pacing. The result is a literary hagiography, simple and inspiring—not what a reader of only Waugh’s comic fiction might expect. Here again, though, Blayac has spotted a pattern, one that points to the “equilibrium” biographical writing adds to Waugh’s oeuvre and life:

If, in the anti-heroes of his fiction, Waugh showed what might have happened to him without the help of religion, biography showed examples of those he would have to emulate; biography changed him, made him a new man.

The form of Knox indicates just how much Waugh was capable of changing as a biographer. This is the meticulous work, complete with the scholarly accouterments of footnotes, appendix, and bibliography. Still, it is superficial in an important sense that Waugh himself acknowledged. As if anticipating Graham Greene’s later objection that writing a biography of a priest is like describing an iceberg from the waterline up, Waugh outlined his authorial intention quite plainly: “to tell the story of [Knox’s] exterior life, not to give a conspectus of his thought; still less to measure his spiritual achievements” (133). His book has still not precipitated the “many weightier studies” of Knox that Waugh anticipated, but it remains as a surprisingly thorough introduction to the life of the priest with whom the author most identified.
We can surely learn more of Knox the man from this biography than we can of Campion from Campion. In combination, though, the two books provide a fascinating frame through which to view the development of Waugh’s sensibility as a complete writer, and a demonstration of the reciprocity between present and past that quickens the best biographical writing. Two Lives is worth reading for either reason, but preferably for both.

Notes:
[1] I am indebted to Professor Blayac of University Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3 for permission to quote from his symposium essay.

[2] The U.S. cover is slightly different, but the effect is the same.

Surprised by Cinema
Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel, by Lisa Colletta. New York & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 154 pp. $59.95.

Bright Young Things (2003), dir. Stephen Fry. 106 min. Reviewed by Sebastian Perry.

‘But, good heavens, there isn’t a word in the book–you must be misinterpreting it.’ (Vile Bodies, ch. 2)

As Adam Fenwick-Symes learns to his cost, books have a habit of being construed in ways the author never intended. Stephen Fry and Lisa Colletta have put forward two very different interpretations of Vile Bodies and I am not entirely confident that, like Customs officers scouring for smut, they have not each merely found what they wanted to find. For Colletta, Waugh’s novel is unsparingly brutal in its satire but entirely devoid of didactic intent. The narrator ‘doesn’t mock with a stable set of values, and the only constant is that he is willing to make everything and everybody the butt of his joke’ (88). Emotional involvement in the story is impossible because of the ‘relentless shallowness’ (91) of the characters: ‘We may feel sympathy for the plight of Adam Fenwick-Symes…but we do not feel his pain’ (9). The book offers no possibility of redemption from the chaotic world it depicts, and the reader’s only solace is ‘to wrest from pain a momentary victory in laughter’ (11). This is a lively and provocative study, making use of work on humour by Freud and Bergson and applying it to an unusual combination of novels–the others are Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Compton-Burnett’s A House and Its Head and Powell’s Afternoon Men. Yet I wonder if Vile Bodies really belongs in her theoretical framework, at least considering what we know about its author. ‘It seems misguided,’ she insists, ‘to read the early novels through the lens of his later conversion’ (82). But that conversion took place only a matter of months after the publication of Vile Bodies in 1930 (not 1929 as stated on p. 81) so it’s surely not fallacious to assume that religious anxieties informed its composition. Colletta believes that the book’s dark humour leaves the reader ‘with a certain sense of victory’ (101), in spite of the unredeemed nihilism of the plot. Personally I don’t get any feeling of triumph from reading the novel but, more importantly, it’s clear that Waugh got none from writing it. For him at least, laughing in the face of despair was no solution at all.
It’s long been recognized that Waugh’s early novels owe a great deal to the cinema. Its ‘inestimable value’ to novelists, he told Dudley Carew, was that it taught them to ‘bring home thoughts by actions and incidents. Don’t make everything said.’[1] One would therefore expect Vile Bodies, with its eventful plot, rapid cross-cutting and heavy reliance on dialogue, to be perfect fodder for a film adaptation. Paradoxically, however, as Stephen Fry’s directorial debut Bright Young Things makes clear, it’s precisely this dependence on cinematic techniques that makes the novel so unsuitable for the screen. Put simply, Fry has made everything said. Matters implicit or indirectly alluded to in the novel are in the film expanded and expounded to the nth degree. Thus a passing comment from Adam that Miles ‘has had to leave the country’ (ch. 13) becomes in Fry’s hands a tearful jeremiad on society’s intolerance, as Miles (played by Michael Sheen) flees a homosexual scandal. Not only is there ample didacticism but it is also embarrassingly crude, both visually–the dizzying speed and circularity of modern life are conveyed by having the camera spin round and round very fast–and verbally–as when Adam, lapsing out of character, delivers what in the novel is a lengthy narrative digression on parties (‘Masked parties, Savage parties…’) as a clunking sermon to Nina. Rendering visible that which writers only hint at is, of course, what directors are supposed to do, so perhaps it’s churlish to complain that the film doesn’t leave as much to the imagination; but the point is that by filling in the gaps Fry has utterly transformed the tenor and tone of the book. Whereas Waugh’s characters appear to lack the interiority that would allow us to feel for them, Fry’s are nearly all surprisingly likeable. Adam and Nina are haplessly inarticulate but, thanks in part to excellent performances from Stephen Campbell Moore and Emily Mortimer, we never doubt their feelings for each other or lose concern for their plight. Even Simon Balcairn’s suicide, one of the novel’s grim comic highlights, is played as a moment of unalloyed pathos. Mockery of the characters is always gentle and consequently the film, although funny, never succeeds in producing the fits of hysterical laughter to which readers of Waugh are accustomed. To a certain extent, this was inevitable: had Fry cast an ensemble of automata, it would have made for a ghastly viewing experience. Perhaps it must simply be conceded that certain facets of Waugh’s style can’t be replicated in any other medium. One thought did trouble me upon leaving the cinema, however. By making his characters sympathetic human beings, is Fry imposing his own mawkish sentimentality on the text, or is he as a reader supplying what Waugh deliberately left space for? When I first read the novel I took Waugh’s portrayal of Nina as an example of his misogyny; seeing Bright Young Things, I’m left to wonder if it’s actually an indictment of my own. Applying Stanley Fish to Evelyn Waugh is admittedly rather fanciful but it is pleasing to speculate whether some of the traditional attitudes towards Waugh rest on a failure of imagination on the part of his critics.

Notes:
[1] Quoted in Douglas Lane Patey, The Life of Evelyn Waugh, 78.

Et in Arcadia Non Ego
Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Biography, 1924-1966, by John Howard Wilson. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2001. 198 pp. $36.50. Reviewed by Jonathan Pitcher, University College London.

The real test, of course, is not whether an artist subverts social and aesthetic norms in his work, but whether or not his character-structure obeys them: nonconformity in one’s work does not necessarily mean nonconformity in character-structure. The writer Murray Kempton once observed in a meditation on the personality of Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski that ‘the great lives are lived against the perceived current of the times. There are men who change history by stubborn resistance to it and they represent the greatness that rises from appreciating the relevance of what the modern mind tends to dismiss as obsolescent.’
--Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? (84-85)

       Although John Howard Wilson rightly ventures that this book may be read independently of his other work, it is the second part of an eventual trilogy, and as such has a pre-existing context. The prequel, spanning the years 1903 to 1924, was mentioned as a foil in Sebastian Perry’s recent review of Douglas Lane Patey’s The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography: “While J. H. Wilson has dedicated an entire volume to Waugh’s childhood, adolescence and undergraduate days, Patey (perhaps sharing his subject’s scorn for the ‘Voodoo, Bog-magic’ of psychology) allows that period only fifteen pages” (9). Whilst I have no a priori objection to the genre of literary biography, particularly in the case of Waugh whose work assuredly elicits this approach, it is a field that has fast become crowded, requiring a sturdy pair of elbows. Christopher Sykes’ authorized version suggested from the first that “other biographical studies could and perhaps should be written” (ix), and indeed a slew of memoirs, diaries, letters, satellitic books on the “Brideshead Set,” and biographies (there is even Norman Page’s “day-planner” Chronology) have accepted the invitation, Martin Stannard’s and Selina Hastings’ still most lengthily among them. Sykes may be haphazardly anecdotal, and Hastings obscures rather than exposes her subject via a penchant for luridness--her premise from the opening page is to define the extent of Waugh’s monstrosity and the book ends abruptly with a sentence notifying the reader of Margaret Waugh’s death on the Chalk Farm Road, as if present sensationalism would elucidate Waugh to his present audience--but neither is devoid of literary criticism, of the life / fiction symbiosis. One of Stannard’s explicit criteria, in addition to correcting Sykes’ occasional waywardness, is “to forge a relationship between the crucial events of Waugh’s life and his developing aesthetic” (xviii). Wilson’s intention, from the first volume, is to focus “on the delicate relationship between Waugh’s life and his writing” (11), and though he describes his three predecessors’ labors as “conventional” (11), a proleptic, compelling rationale for writing further biography, even “literary” biography, is missing.
     Despite Perry’s assertion of voodoo, there is little psychological mystification in either study. In the first, Wilson is more interested in the juvenilia, however fumbling and misspelt such endeavors happen to be, as the precursor to later majuscules, at no point insinuating that the former work or life is marked by some intrinsic, Freudian subtext and is therefore truer to Waugh than the latter. To the contrary, at Lancing, when asked to select a passage from Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, Waugh opts for those chapters recounted by Sir Bors, and Wilson refashions the episode as “Bors’s nostalgic, disillusioned musing appealed to Waugh’s sense of the past as both irrecoverable and superior to the present” (78), a sense that psychology would render mendacious. Wilson is by no means oblivious to Waugh’s often affected susceptibility to victimization, his early inclination towards intellectual vandalism and the groups that espoused it: at home under the sway of his brother’s first wife, Barbara Jacobs, whom Waugh himself describes as “‘subversive by tradition’” (51), at Lancing in the “role of iconoclast” (57), and to some extent amidst the sybaritism of Oxford. All of this, however, the anarchic strain, is almost simultaneously deflated, superficially attractive though progressively recognized as meaningless flailing, with Lancing re-presented, through its lackadaisical attitude towards Christianity, as a “spiritual void” (86), and Oxford through Waugh’s increasing “dissatisfaction with the hedonist’s life” (106). This oscillation, which is always “re-lived” and resolved in the ultimate intelligibility of fiction, is Wilson’s purview, a thesis that allows him to present all such headiness paradoxically, as phases that must be lived simply to be discarded, an ontological flux that is quite the opposite of psychology’s, and his subject is indeed consistent on this point, even in youth. As a boy, suffering from paralysis as a result of his appendectomy, Waugh recovered at his therapist’s house, which Wilson describes as a “Dickensian world” (30) that “stimulated fantasies of escape into the past” (30), concurrently warding off Robert J. Kloss’ reading of “escape” (from home): “We can be skeptical when Kloss asserts that ‘Waugh’s pre-oedipal conflicts dominated his creative urge’” (30). Similarly, the aunts’ house in Midsomer Norton becomes a leitmotif, a haven of Victoriana that steadfastly permits Waugh to become his own subtext, exerting past order (although, as Wilson knows, “The Victorian age was not much better than the modern period” [17]) over any momentary desire for some speciously natural, “voodoo-esque” archae.
     The debate is both carried with conviction and shaped by way of a wealth of citation, particularly from primary sources, all of which must have demanded an extensive period of meticulous referencing (the project began as a dissertation in 1988), and yet coalesces with Wilson’s prose. Any random page corroborates this mastery of the material, it is arguable that the juvenilia is less trampled ground and that this study manipulates it better than others, but the absence of a gap in the criticism, of a broader, meta-critical context, does linger.
     As if in response, in the second volume, 1924-1966, there is more of an attempt at propaedeutic distinction. Both Patey and David Wykes published in the interim, and Wilson carves his niche: “Patey provides a political and social context for Waugh’s work, but I am more interested in his personal life…. David Wykes has published a more condensed version of this project, but there is still room for further study” (9). The argument is transferred, mutatis mutandis, with the Bright Young People, marriage, and the aristocracy supplanting home, Lancing, and Oxford. The paradox is viably exploited once again, therefore, a mantic refrain to which Wilson always returns, often posited in the same sentence. The first page includes the phrase “Strongly as he was attracted to the Bright Young People, Waugh immediately saw that something was wrong with them” (17), “a complicated ambivalence” between group entropy and a personal longing for discipline which would be re-enacted in both Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies and resolved, as in the first volume, in order’s favor. Wilson concedes that “Some thought Vile Bodies complimentary rather than satiric” (80), just as many are drawn to the Oxonian parts of Brideshead, but here it is read as a simultaneously seductive yet rejected nostalgie de la boue. Waugh “could not break the cycle of parties and drinking” (22) in life, but does break it in his early novels. The ephemeral first marriage, to She-Evelyn, is initially played against conversion to Catholicism and then the stability of Laura and fatherhood, read back into the fiction in the more complex betrayal of figures such as Brenda Last. Wilson also sustains his inverted progression from present insipidness to past substance in defending Waugh against the accusation of snobbishness, submitting that there are few admirable noblemen in the novels. Decline and Fall’s contemporary aristocracy “lacks virtue, and it has nothing to teach the world or even its own children” (Wilson 87). Although the nobility had proved to be a protective force historically, Waugh witnessed the explosion of spurious honors and increasingly confined his veneration to the older and more markedly persecuted Catholic aristocracy, a marginalized position that would find eventual resolution in Guy Crouchback.
     On a more cursory, structural note, despite an original intention to present the three volumes as thirds of Waugh’s life, the sequel eschews the chronological organization of its predecessor in favor of themes, a change that not only necessitates repetition, wrenching the reader through the trauma of the first marriage, the conversion, and even the plot of the novels on several occasions, but also incongruously presenting a Christian and therefore linear life in a form of classical, cyclical time.
     My still lingering, dominant frustration, however, is that despite the consistency and legitimacy of the thesis, there is no prosecution of its possible implications. Sykes noted that as “contemptuous as Evelyn affected to be of the opinion of the intelligentsia, . . . I think he greatly minded what he called the loss of ‘such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries’” (258), and Wykes summarizes the lesson of Roxburgh, Master at Lancing during Waugh’s years, as “One could be independent and diverge from the common ways of doing things without having to become an outsider or a revolutionary” (27). In other words, both, albeit at different moments, recognize the same equivocality pre-Wilson. Stannard toys with the paradox from the beginning, referring to Waugh’s “anarchic defence of order” (3) in his earliest pages and driving it home in his last: “At the root of Waugh’s (admittedly self-contradictory) pronouncements, surely, there is something much simpler and, at the same time, infinitely more complex: the terror of babel” (463). The ensuing thoughts are that Waugh’s teleology precludes all of Picasso, Finnegans Wake, and poststructuralism, which is a monumental contextualization. Wykes may be garishly opinionated, opening with inflated statements such as “the later novels, most of which can fairly be called Catholic, are--in the unashamedly evaluative judgment of this book--of lesser value than those written before Brideshead” (8), and Wilson more persuasive, but by now, even in an overtly “personal” study, at least some consciousness of Waugh’s general relevance (or lack thereof) is a sine qua non. In the book’s penultimate paragraph, Wilson postulates that “If we can identify the origins of his fiction, we can tell how long the experiences occupied his imagination, how he altered them in his novels, and approximately what they meant to him” (166), whereas the more pressing question is what they meant and continue to mean to us.
     One of Sykes’ weakest lines is that Waugh “could have written a French equivalent of Brideshead Revisited within a living tradition” (249), for the briefest of glimpses at a list of canonical French authors is sufficient to conclude that they were syndicating modernity, and even publication would have been a pleasant surprise. Wilson is alive to this nonconformity, or defamiliarization, constructing much of its framework both in life and in fiction, and yet never shores up its fragility, which is to miss some of the significance of the framework itself.

Works Cited
Gablik, Suzi. Has Modernism Failed? New York: Thames, 1984.
Perry, Sebastian. Rev. of The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography, by Douglas Lane Patey.    Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies. 33.1 (2002): 9-10. 13 June 2003.   <http://www.lhup.edu/jwilson3/Newsletter_33.1.htm>.
Stannard, Martin. Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939. New York: Norton, 1987.
---. Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966. New York: Norton, 1992.
Sykes, Christopher. Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. Boston: Little, 1975.
Wilson, John Howard. Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Biography, 1903-1924. Cranbury, NJ:    Associated UPP, 1996.
---. Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Biography, 1924-1966. Cranbury, NJ: Associated UPP, 2001.
Wykes, David. Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life. Basingstoke, Eng.: Macmillan, 1999.

Religion and Empire
Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature, by Christopher Hodgkins. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. 290 pp. $37.50. Reviewed by Steven Trout, Fort Hays State University.

     Christopher Hodgkins's central theme in Reforming Empire is immediately suggested by the book's frontispiece, The Boyhood of Raleigh by the Victorian Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir John Everett Millais. In the painting, a young Walter Raleigh sits wearing a rapt expression while an ear-ringed sailor, presumably in the midst of a yarn, points seaward--toward the future course of empire. Indeed, the painting pulls its viewer, irresistibly, toward the sailor's pointing finger, placed level with the distant horizon. Yet, as Hodgkins observes, this image of imperial promise also contains a subtle "memento mori": in the bottom left-hand corner, far from the visual center of interest, a "listing toy ship" rests on the sand, as if warning of the vanity of colonial ambitions.
     Starting in the sixteenth century, Hodgkins traces the two conflicting impulses recorded in Millais’s painting—the impulse to embark upon voyages of conquest versus the impulse to deplore expansionism—through several centuries of Protestant reflection on the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of British imperialism. He identifies the origins of the British Empire in Tudor-Stuart notions of a resurrected and enlarged Kingdom of Arthur, a Kingdom that would one day (it was hoped) be powerful enough to defeat the Papal Anti-Christ, and in the “Black Legend” that vilified the Conquistadors while simultaneously justifying Protestant empire-building. He also explores the recurring story line, established by Sir Francis Drake, of the Protestant Englishman who, in contrast with the supposedly opportunistic Catholic Spaniards, proves his worthiness as a ruler of non-whites by refusing to be taken for a god. According to Hodgkins, Protestant ideology fueled British imperialism; at the same time, however, Protestant moral convictions—powerfully expressed by such outspoken commentators as Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, William Blake, and E. M. Forster—helped bring about the Empire’s eventual collapse.
     This is an excellent study in every respect. Hodgkins writes with clarity and grace, and his New-Historical critical methodology, which moves back and forth with ease between literary and non-literary texts, fits the topic perfectly. Moreover, the author’s command of more than 400 years of British literature and culture shows on every page, whether he is discussing the colonial implications of Milton’s Paradise Lost or Kipling’s ironic rewriting, in “The Man Who Would Be King,” of Drake’s celebrated refusal to be worshiped as a deity.
     Evelyn Waugh’s appearance in a book focused chiefly on Protestant writers is surprising but nevertheless welcome. Far from ignoring Waugh’s Catholicism, Hodgkins traces Waugh’s ridicule of imperialism in Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust back to the writer’s religious conversion—and to his longing for the “true golden age” represented by medieval Catholic England. For Hodgkins, Waugh’s view of modern England as an essentially heretical society gave added force to his satirical portraits of colonizers behaving badly: “In Waugh’s imperial fictions, agents of a debilitated and secularized Protestant progressivism reduce themselves entertainingly to the absurd, and indeed they haven’t far to go.”
     In short, Christopher Hodgkins has written an important study of the intersection between religion and empire. And, through his sensitive reading of Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust (works typically ignored by scholars of the literature of anti-imperialism), he has given Waugh aficionados cause for celebration.

Not Grand and Far Madder
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, by Mary S. Lovell. New York: Norton, 2001. Norton Paperback, 2003. (Originally published in England under the title The Mitford Girls: The Biography of an Extraordinary Family). 611 pages. $18.95. Reviewed by Patrick Query.     In 1945, while Nancy Mitford worked on her autobiographical novel, The Pursuit of Love, she worried that people might think she was copying the first-person model from Evelyn Waugh’s recent Brideshead Revisited. She wrote to Waugh, her close friend, to assure him that this was not her intention. Her book, she said, was “about my family, a very different cup of tea, not grand and far madder” (395). Indeed, there have been few families, even in fiction, capable of providing “madder” material than the Mitfords. And, while many of the locales and doings in Mary S. Lovell’s The Sisters are (as Debo Mitford might say) no end grand, this does little to diminish the madness of the saga, which at times reads with the hilarity of a comic novel by Waugh himself.
     Readers will enjoy Lovell’s remarkable book for at least two reasons. First, it tells a superb story, crafted with grace and lightness of touch. Second, it provides a handy socio-political introduction to the twentieth-century West, owing to its span (1894-2000) and its cast of minor and major characters, including the Kennedys, the Churchills, Adolf Hitler, Charles de Gaulle, and Queen Elizabeth.
     Although The Sisters stretches over a century, its central story is that of England and Europe entre deux guerres. Fully half the book focuses on the years 1919-1939.
     Diana, with whom Waugh was once in love, was a center in the world of infamous Bright Young People (immortalized in Waugh’s Vile Bodies), and Nancy befriended several of the Oxford aesthetes who would become known as the Brideshead generation. The Mitford girls’ real decade was the 1930s, which accounts for nearly forty percent of Lovell’s text. The family name becomes a household one when Unity falls in love with Hitler, Decca elopes with the nephew of Winston Churchill to civil-war Spain, Diana marries Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, Debo makes her society debut, and Nancy begins her writing career in earnest.
     This part of the book is dominated by Unity and Diana. Lovell is aware that history has been much kinder to Jessica, the Communist, than to these Fascists, but she sets out early on to establish her objectivity: “The reader is as capable as I am of forming his or her own opinions based on the evidence, and an individual social ideology” (3). One of the book’s primary shortcomings, though, is that the author’s resolve regularly withers under that burden of public sentiment, and she nervously insulates many of her references to fascism with invocations of hindsight. At least half a dozen times she says something along these lines: “[I]t is important to recognize that in 1928 Tom was speaking without the benefit of hindsight” (107) or “It is important to recall that at that time Fascism, as a political model, was unmarred by the horrors we now associate with Nazism” (137). Not only is this kind of handholding insulting to a reader’s intellect, but it also undercuts one of the central questions raised by the Mitford story: What about Fascism appealed to reasonable and intelligent people of the 1920s and 30s? Ironically, the model for a more honest and rewarding view of history is provided by Lovell’s subject. Diana said as recently as 2001 that “It is not a question of right or wrong, but the impressions of a young woman in the thirties. Of course it would be easy just to deny these, but it would not be very interesting, or true” (5). The wisdom of Waugh’s own inveighing against the “highly nervous and vocal party” who saw in fascism only a “bogy” is in the same spirit.[1] Lovell acknowledges that the politics of the 1930s are at the very heart of this book: “It was the opposing forces of Fascism and Communism that lit the tinder of the girls’ lives and set alight fires that propelled them from the ordinary to the extraordinary, and made them household names” (529). So it is a disservice to an otherwise impressive study that Lovell decides ultimately not to meet the reader honestly upon this most difficult, and important, issue.
     This unfortunate drawback, though, does not negate the overall delight of reading The Sisters, a book that has for good reason been highly acclaimed in both England and the United States.

Note:
[1] Letter in New Statesman & Nation, 5 March 1938.