Decline and Fall as a Critique of Marxism
by Greg Shupak

     Frederick L. Beaty comments that Evelyn Waugh was “sceptical about the ability of any political system to improve either man or society” (119) and that Waugh felt “bitter hostility toward socialist philosophy” (20).  Decline and Fall (1928), for instance, criticizes the theories of Karl Marx.  Waugh objects to the prospect of severing ties to traditional values and existing social relations.  He also resists the idea of proletarian revolution.  Waugh disagrees with Marx’s idea that atheism is a vehicle to human emancipation.  Furthermore, Waugh creates camaraderie between different classes and a socially mobile protagonist.  In these ways, he undermines Marx’s notions of class consciousness, class struggle, and revolution.
     One prominent difference between Waugh’s novel and Marx’s theories is their treatment of religion.  Marx believes that religion is a symptom of alienated labour, a destructive diversion from the misery of the working class (Wolff 20-1).  In Decline and Fall, on the other hand, faith is a source of redemption.  After the tumult of expulsion, imprisonment, and failed engagement, Paul’s life becomes much more tranquil.  Specifically, he is in his “third year of uneventful residence at Scone” (213), studying to be a clergyman (214).  This commitment is incompatible with Marx’s claim.  For Paul, preparing for ordination has not been destructive.  Instead, it has brought stability to his life.  Moreover, Paul does not turn to religion to divert his attention from misery.  Shortly after his death is faked, he tells Silenus of his plan to study theology (207).  Paul is beginning his life anew when he decides to pursue religious scholarship.  Having been declared legally dead, Paul no longer needs to be distracted.
     It is noteworthy that he reveals this choice in a chapter entitled “Resurrection.”  Paul’s death and rebirth suggest that he has had a religious experience.  A divine event, not desolation, inspires Paul to become a clergyman.  Two of the wealthier characters seek escape.  Margot is taking sleeping pills (127) and her son, Peter, is an alcoholic (125).  Waugh inverts Marx’s theory and presents bourgeois characters who are trying to divert themselves.
     Waugh’s belief in providence is also important.  Contrary to Marx’s idea that humans need to overcome the illusion of God, Waugh believes that God designs the world in meaningful order.  Both Jeffrey Heath and Douglas Lane Patey note the tension between fortune and providence in Decline and Fall.  Patey describes a world of fortune “seemingly governed by chance, where reward is disconnected from desert” (71).  Put another way, fortune involves people receiving what they have not earned.  Marx’s vision of an atheist society would “inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability to each according to his need” (Wolff 95).  Such a system is a perversion for Waugh.  It is an arrangement where “there are priests without faith, unjust judges, a physician who kills, mannish women and womanish men, childlike adults and children […] prematurely catapulted into adult knowingness” (Patey 62).  In these respects, Waugh warns against giving rewards where there is no merit.  He believes that chaos is the only alternative to divine order.  Marx believes that people must empower themselves by discarding the idea that human life is governed by divine providence and then redistribute goods to the needy.  It is important to note a rhetorical tension: Marx’s rational, just order is what Waugh calls fortune, a world governed by the irrational.  The root of this discrepancy lies in the source of reason: for Marxists it is the human mind, but for Waugh it is God.
     Paul Pennyfeather demonstrates Waugh’s faith in providence.  Early in the text, Paul's life is governed by fortune.  He proposes a toast, “[t]o Fortune, […] a much-maligned lady” (157).  Yet Paul’s life stabilizes when he joins the church.  As Patey observes, “from the start, characters point out their life stories to Paul in confessions that hint the appropriateness of his clerical vocation” (72).  As such, providence has guided Paul toward the clergy.  The crucial point is that Paul finds his vocation only after he steps off Fortune’s Wheel (209).
     Waugh is sceptical of the idea that man must depart from the past to achieve morality.  Describing the destruction of an old Tudor estate, Waugh demonstrates reverence for tradition: “the work of demolition proceeded, with the aid of all that was most pulverizing in modern machinery” (119).  For Waugh, this process represents the destruction of social roots.[1]  A Marxist revolution also involves a break from tradition.  Furthermore, Marx argues that social arrangements change when technology improves (Wolff 55).  The machines that Waugh describes are analogous to the technology that Marx believes will liberate the proletariat.  Waugh is critical of such changes, as in this sarcastic remark: “the drains [are] satisfactory, but […] underground” (125).  Houses can be symbols of social relations.  A house is a physical structure, akin to an economic arrangement, a social structure.  Each generation leaves its mark by creating homes, so scholars study historical architecture to learn about the past.  That the Tudor house is demolished and replaced by a hideous modern building suggests that Waugh is apprehensive about the future; he implies that newness does not necessarily equal progress, particularly when it requires a departure from tradition.  Patey, moreover, draws attention to the imagery of destruction.  He points out that Oxford authorities “watch as the Bollers destroy a Matisse, a grand piano, the manuscript of a prize poem – embodiments of cultural traditions” (61).  For Waugh, deviating from tradition precipitates the destruction of time-tested values.  He is certainly very sceptical of Marx’s notion that humans must shed capitalism and religion in order to be free.
     Secularism is the deviation that Waugh is most concerned about.  Prendergast, a “‘Modern Churchman’ who […] need not commit himself to any religious belief” (141), is decapitated after he becomes a prison chaplain.  The elimination of a non-denominational clergyman demonstrates Waugh’s contempt for secularism.  Marxists would support a secular movement away from alienation, a shift that can mitigate religious strife and facilitate class consciousness.  Socialists would also endorse non-denominational faith, because it is a step away from organized religion and thus a shift toward the rule of reason.  Waugh believes that secularism destroys longstanding values, as it destroys Prendergast.
     Silenus is the cold, sterile architect who designs the new King’s Thursday.  Heath points out that Silenus is associated with inebriation and that Waugh’s book presents a history of drunkenness (64) wherein faulty values are attributed to erratic discipline (68).  Principles are being eroded because adults are too feral, too self-indulgent to teach morals to the younger generation.  This kind of behaviour is sometimes associated with socialist states where, in Marx’s words, “I can do one thing today and another tomorrow […] just as I have a mind” (Wolff 95).  Silenus is more clearly linked to Marxism in a parody of Hamlet, as he “speaks for those who would replace faulty but striving humanity with the antiseptic perfection of the automaton” (Heath 70).  Automation is a key feature of communism, because machines will take over the means of production and free people to occupy themselves as they wish.  “Antiseptic” describes not only machines, but also impersonal bureaucracies that are responsible for allocating resources in socialist states.  Waugh therefore uses a name associated with drunkenness to suggest that Marx’s utopia would undermine morality and create a dehumanized society; Silenus, who does not sleep, barely seems human.
     Grimes, by contrast, is Waugh’s figure of insatiable appetite.  Grimes states, “I don’t believe anyone can ever be truly unhappy for long provided one does just exactly what one wants to and when one wants,” and Heath notes that Waugh depicts a “perverted world in which the love of God has been ousted by the love of the senses” (74).  Marx wants people to be emancipated from capitalism so that they can cultivate their minds by using increased leisure time to absorb high culture.  Grimes perverts Marx’s thoughts into a license to desert in wartime, to walk out on his wife, and to break out of prison.  Waugh’s criticism is that Marxism erodes ethics and undermines discipline.  Grimes indulges in sensual pleasures, which are inherently divorced from spirituality.  Grimes lives a godless, unprincipled life, Waugh’s warning against the perils of Marxism.
     Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery, a prison governor, also destroys history.  Patey notes that Lucas-Dockery acts without regard to legal precedents, “the vehicle by which the accumulated wisdom of past generations is transmitted to the present” (69).  Lucas-Dockery believes that inmates ought to be allowed to express themselves artistically.  Through this character, Waugh mocks another of Marx’s theories of alienation.  For Marx, a person who is not creative is alienated, detached from human experience (Wolff 35).  In Decline and Fall, after speaking to Paul, Lucas-Dockery has a conversation with the Chief Warder:

     ‘[W]hat a difference it made to him to think that, far from being a mere nameless slave, he has now become part of a great revolution in statistics.’ 
     ‘Yes, sir,’ said the Chief Warder, ‘and, by the way, there are two more attempted suicides being brought up tomorrow.  […]  Those sharp tools you’ve issued to the Arts and Crafts School is just putting temptation in the men’s way.’ (168)

Waugh undermines Marx’s theory by demonstrating that not everybody has creative capacity.  He indicates that a criminal might use tools for violence, as in the murder of Prendergast.  In the absence of creative instincts, humans do not need art to realize themselves.  Waugh’s idea is especially emphatic because he turns the idea of creative emancipation on its head: far from using art to become fully human, to live a fuller life, the prisoners take these tools and try to end their lives.
     In this passage, the refutation of Marxism goes even further.  It is ironic that Lucas-Dockery assumes Paul will feel liberated when he becomes a statistic instead of a prisoner.  Furthermore, Lucas-Dockery says that Paul will no longer be a nameless slave.  Yet becoming a number is hardly a humanizing process, and becoming a statistic implies namelessness.  Lucas-Dockery is an appointee of the Labour government (171), so his political beliefs are leftist, and Waugh makes him a figure of ridicule.  Lucas-Dockery’s reference to “revolution,” moreover, reminds the reader of Marxism.  Indeed, there is a parallel between Lucas-Dockery’s fallacy and Marx’s idea that socialism will free labourers from being slaves to capitalists.  In a planned economy, when the state allocates resources, people become numbers instead of servants of the bourgeoisie.  Questioning Lucas-Dockery’s logic, Waugh suggests that being a statistic is akin to slavery. 
     Lucas-Dockery also portrays the amity that, at times, exists between the upper and lower classes in Decline and Fall.  He has a knighthood or baronetcy, served as the “Chair of Sociology at a Midland university” (166), and became governor of the prison by political appointment.  Though his efforts are badly misguided, and perhaps narcissistic, Lucas-Dockery reaches out to his prisoners.  He treats the incarcerated with an alarming amount of tenderness.  Waugh writes that Lucas-Dockery’s predecessor, Colonel MacAdder, told him, “‘[d]on’t bother about the lower warders or the prisoners.  Give hell to the man immediately below you.’  […]  Sir Wilfred, however, had his own ideas.  ‘You must understand,’ he said to Paul, ‘that it is my aim to establish personal contact with each of the men under my care’” (167).  The officers and the prisoners are beneath Lucas-Dockery in both the prison’s hierarchy of authority and in social status, but he disregards MacAdder’s advice.  In other words, Lucas-Dockery chooses not to exploit people in the classes beneath him; he deliberately eschews class consciousness.  In this instance, there is no class warfare.
     Similarly, there are class implications when Paul is engaged to Margot.  At the beginning of the novel, Paul is expelled from Scone College after Trumpington’s Bollinger Club deprives him of his trousers in public (12-13).  At this point in the text, Trumpington represents the elite and Paul is the upper middle class.  After being expelled and then denied his inheritance (16), Paul is left without money or an education.  Hired at a modest salary, Paul goes to Llanabba Castle and meets his wealthy fiancée.  He goes from having nothing to living a life of decadence.  In Waugh’s providential world, Trumpington did Paul a favour by getting him expelled from Scone: he set him on the path to privilege.  Paul expresses his gratitude by making Trumpington the best man at his wedding.  This choice demonstrates that, with the help of providence, a wealthy man has helped someone to improve his social position.  Clearly, such assistance is the antithesis of exploitation.  That God helps to guide Paul up the social hierarchy is a further affront to Marx, who believes that religion is a symptom of exploitation and a barrier to proletarian progress.
     Decline and Fall also demonstrates discord that exists within classes.  Paul’s guardian keeps Paul’s inheritance and spends it on his daughter so that she will be more desirable for a wealthy suitor (16).  Paul and his guardian are from the same class.  Since he has to resort to taking Paul’s money to improve his daughter’s social position, it is reasonable to conclude that the guardian is not particularly affluent.  Having been chosen to watch over Paul, the guardian was close to Paul’s father and therefore likely to be in a comparable socio-economic class.  It follows that the guardian steals from someone in his own class when he refuses to give Paul the money.  This theft is not a case of a Marxist inter-class war; it is an intra-class betrayal.  Clearly, class consciousness is diluted when there is economic discontent within a class.  Similarly, Margot lets Paul go to prison for being involved in her prostitution ring but does not accept a share of the blame.  Paul is released from prison because of an order from “the Home Secretary granting leave for you to go into a private nursing-home for the removal of your appendix” (200).  Since Margot is engaged to the Home Secretary and Paul does not need this surgery, it is implied that Margot helps Paul get out of jail.  Margot reverses a key tenet of Marxism: she helps Paul when he is in a lower class and mistreats him when they are in the same social realm.  Margot’s and the guardian’s decisions reflect internal class strife and undermine Marx’s theory of class consciousness.
     It is also worthwhile to examine Paul’s social positions in the text.  He goes from being middle class at Oxford to having nothing to sharing in Margot’s affluence and then to incarceration.  Back at Scone, Paul begins his career as a clergyman, back in the same socio-economic place.  Clearly, Paul is socially mobile.  More striking is that his status shifts so dramatically in less than one year (209).  This fluidity is perhaps Waugh’s strongest refutation of Marxism.  For Marx, class is an inexorable force that precipitates “world-historical change” (Wolff 51).  In Decline and Fall, class is so fickle that Paul experiences life on the highest rungs of society and in its lowest depths in a matter of months.  With all of these social fluctuations,  Paul does not truly belong to any particular socio-economic group.  When a person’s position shifts so frequently, there can be no class warfare; there can be no class struggle when Paul and Trumpington shift from social antagonism to friendship so quickly.  Such rapid mobility, moreover, undermines class consciousness.  Without class warfare and class consciousness, Marx’s prediction of a socialist revolution seems unlikely.
     Waugh does not defend capitalism, but he does ridicule Marx’s conception of tradition, revolution, and religion.  Waugh adds specificity to some of Marx’s ideas, such as creativity and alienation, to demonstrate that Marx’s notions are too general.  Similarly, Waugh does not suggest that there is unity between the classes, but at times he presents civility between them; the critical point is that, in Decline and Fall, the upper class does not consummately, ruthlessly exploit the lower class.  Waugh censures Marxism by negating some of its key tenets.

Note
[1] Waugh suggests that the house has failed to adapt over time: “[m]odern democracy called for lifts and labour-saving devices, for hot-water taps and cold-water taps” (117).  This indictment, however, is a criticism of the Beste-Chetwyndes, who have failed to maintain a link between progress and the past.  In doing so, the family has failed to honour the past.

Works Cited
Beaty, Frederick L.  The Ironic World of Evelyn Waugh: A Study of Eight Novels.  DeKalb, IL:   Northern Illinois UP, 1992.
Heath, Jeffrey.  The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and His Writing.  London: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1982.
Patey, Douglas Lane.  The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography.  Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
Waugh, Evelyn.  Decline and Fall.  1928.  London: Penguin, 1970.
Wolff, Jonathan.  Why Read Marx Today?  New York:  Oxford UP, 2002.

Complex, Subtle, Jesuitical
Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination, by Mark Bosco, S. J.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.  American Academy of Religion Academy Series.  205 pp.  $45.00.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma.

     As indicated by the series title under which Mark Bosco’s impressive book appears, this is at least as much -- sometimes more -- a work of theology as of literary criticism in which it is frequently difficult to decide whether theology is used to illuminate Greene’s novels or the novels are used to illustrate theological points.
     Bosco’s central purpose is to blur or abolish the distinction frequently made between Greene’s four “Catholic novels”—concentrating on The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair—and those published after 1951, especially The Honorary Consul,  The Human Factor,  Dr. Fischer of Geneva, or the Bomb Party, and Monsignor Quixote.  Although he mentions Greene’s theological reading and friendships with various priests during the 1930s, nothing before Brighton Rock, except brief mention of The Man Within, gets any attention or even a place in the “References.”
     Rather than Catholic and post-Catholic, Bosco distinguishes between the four major books written in the context of Catholic doctrine and practice up to the Second Vatican Council and those written after. Pre-Conciliar doctrine and practice he calls “analogical” or vertical, emphasizing the relationship of the individual to God and a “Christology from above,” emphasizing the divinity of Jesus and descending “into concerns of human existence.”  The novels written later, in the context of Vatican II debates and documents, reflect, often by implication rather than the Catholic novels’ more direct statement, a faith which emphasizes the “dialectical,” the possibility of detente with other faiths and theories, and a “Christology from below [which] begins with the historical Jesus proclaiming his commitment to the ‘Kingdom of God’ and rises to the dogmatic formulas of the early Christian church.”  Pope Paul VI, through his encyclical Populorum Pregressio, becomes a key figure of post-council hope; John Paul II and the Curia squelched much of that spirit.
     Readers raised in the pre-Conciliar Church will find little new in the discussions of the dogmatic context of the Catholic novels, but the presentation of the theological debates that led to and came out of the Council explains to the non-specialist and to Catholics indifferent to theology what happened and why.  Most important for Greene’s novels is the post-Conciliar blurring of previous body/spirit divisions and the tendency to regard, as his French influences did, the flesh as inherently evil or at best dangerous. Equally important, both for Greene and his characters, is the distinction between faith and belief.
     Bosco’s approach is primarily thematic rather than literary, so that, except for late novellas which he admits are weak, he seems to regard all of the novels as equal in quality.  I think that he overrates the late novels, though his discussion of The Honorary Consul almost convinces me that I ought to finish a book which I abandoned, some 40 pages in, as a recycling of characters and scenes from earlier Greene.  While I find Monsignor Quixote an agreeable work, I do not think it Greene’s “last great novel” but rather a pleasant entertainment occupying in his oeuvre much the same position as The Short Reign of Pippin IV does in John Steinbeck’s.  There is ample thematic material in both for extended discussion, but that says nothing about the execution nor does it answer Paul Fussell’s snarky question, “Can Graham Greene Write English?”
     Students of Waugh will find little to engage them directly.  Bosco states that Catholic liberals prefer Greene, Catholic conservatives Waugh.  That is not my reaction, since I was first attracted to Waugh in the 1950s because he could be Catholic without being grim.  But Bosco’s comments about Greene’s sense of evil led me to wonder if Waugh had a similar sense.  Rex Mottram?  Trimmer?  Ludovic?  Ian Kilbannock?  It could be argued that they are not fully human and are therefore not culpable.  The Communists in Sword of Honour?  They are mistaken and possibly amoral, but they act from principle. Indeed, by the end of the trilogy all seems to be, if not forgiven, at least largely forgotten.
     But this is a question open to debate, perhaps in the Newsletter or at the 2006 meeting of the Waugh Society.  It is clear that, given Waugh’s comparative orthodoxy, it would be difficult to produce a book about him that is as complex and subtle, indeed Jesuitical, as Mark Bosco has written about Graham Greene.

     The cognac was not to Rex's taste.  It was clear and pale and it came to us in a bottle free from grime and Napoleonic cyphers.  It was only a year or two older than Rex and lately bottled.  They gave it to us in very thin tulip-shaped glasses of modest size. 

Rex describes it as "the sort of stuff he put soda in at home," and the waiters are forced, "shamefacedly," to wheel "out of its hiding place the vast and mouldy bottle they kept for people of Rex's sort."  Charles describes it as a "treacly concoction" (Little, Brown, 177).
     Why does Rex reject the first cognac?  What is the significance of its being free from "Napoleonic cyphers"?  Why does Rex prefer the "mouldy bottle" and the "treacly concoction"?  What is the irony of this scene?  Any insight would be appreciated.