By Evelyn Waugh
The Satirical Rogue
Evelyn Waugh wrote Decline and Fall, his first book, at the age of twenty-five. Most young writers compare the giddy throes of that initial burst of creativity to a kind of drunkenness—young, brash, and brimming with authorial enthusiasm, they are intoxicated by the thrill of artistic discovery.
Well, Evelyn Waugh was by all accounts a mean drunk, and Decline and Fall is a hilariously mean-spirited book.
Mean-spirited, perhaps, but undeniably full of spirit. Like PG Wodehouse’s mischievous younger brother—the one who pulls wings off butterflies and fries ants beneath a magnifying glass—Waugh tears into British hypocrisy and human stupidity with something like joyful exuberance. While most of us repent our sin and frailty, Waugh revels in fallen human nature.
The story is a skewed bildungsroman, that ever-popular genre of fiction wherein a young hero or heroine embarks on a journey of self-discovery. Our hero is Paul Pennyfeather, an affable young student at Oxford who is wrongly (well, sort of wrongly) accused of indecent exposure when he is separated from his trousers in a case of mistaken-identity hazing.
Like Nicholas Nickleby before him, Pennyfeather must make his own way in the world and soon lands a position as a teacher at a boys school of questionable repute (Waugh had also taught at a private school in ). He is assigned to give organ lessons despite having no musical ability whatsoever. “Do the best you can,” is the headmaster’s helpful advice. Pennyfeather is a quick study; his method for keeping a classful of unruly prepubescents occupied is quite ingenious: a reward of half a crown to whoever writes the longest essay, irrespective of quality.
A fringe benefit of his position is an introduction to high society vis-à-vis his students’ parents. One over-sexualized dish, a Miss Margot Best-Chetwynde, takes a fancy to Pennyfeather and hires him as her son’s personal tutor. Thinking himself “rather smart” for capturing the wandering eye of Margot, Pennyfeather soon discovers that there is a high price to pay for attempting to scale the social ladder.
As the names “Pennyfeather” and “Best-Chetwynde” imply, Decline and Fall features a roll-call of Dickensian caricatures: Lady Circumference, Lord Tangent, and Captain Grimes are a few more of the colorfully nomenclatured characters that Pennyfeather encounters along the way. None are wholly convincing humans, they seem more like medieval allegories of the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Folly, Lust, Sloth, etc. This is characteristic of satire as a genre, however, and Waugh manages to make the drink-sodden polygamist Grimes, for example, a vivid presence (if not exactly three-dimensional, he is at least as striking as a figurine from a pop-out book.)
Pennyfeather is an empty shell of a hero. He bounces like a pinball from place to place, always acted-upon and rarely doing anything. He even moderately enjoys a stint in prison—he feels “free” because he never has to make decisions for himself. That’s part of the point, I think. Pennyfeather’s hapless civility is essential to his character make-up, and the fact that no one takes much notice of him helps bring the story round full circle in the last act (in a plot device oddly similar to Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho—a story that depended on its “hero” being indistinguishable from most other privileged young men.)
With PG Wodehouse there is always affection for his characters, however dumb, brutish, vain, or insipid. With Waugh there is only sneering disdain. One is grateful that the unforgiving Waugh, though later a Catholic convert, would never sit in judgment of his fellow men except for in his fiction. For as Hamlet said, “Use every man after his desert and who should ’scape whipping.’
Though I prefer to ’scape whipping in my own life, witnessing Waugh whip others can be maliciously amusing. Decline and Fall is a lightning fast read—flashy and crackling with energy. Waugh takes aim at so many targets so indiscriminately (British class systems, educational institutions, prison life, brutalist German architecture, conspicuous consumption, and loose society women for starters) that one can’t blame him if a few are only glancing blows. Sketchy, scattershot scenes tumble one after the other in a mad cinematic rush, and Waugh is on to the next target before you can stop to assess the damage to the last one.
He would hone his skills as a satirist in the years to come—Decline and Fall is more cudgel than scalpel—but it is a quick and amusing read. As an opening salvo to Waugh’s career, it certainly proved loud and attention-getting; a full-frontal assault. No doubt British society felt pummeled by Waugh’s Blitzkrieg.
Tags: black comedy, British class system, Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh, social satire
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