Decline and Fall

To most Americans, Evelyn Waugh is known, if he is known at all, as the author of Brideshead Revisited, a nostalgic look backwards from 1945 to an earlier, idyllic and idealized England as perceived through the lens of Oxford student life and the upper class world of one of the great country homes of England.

As I discussed in a post in 2008, the underlying theme of Brideshead, over which its portrayal of an opulent society was something of a golden gloss, was theological -- in fact, explicitly, Roman Catholic.  This religious aspect was downplayed to some extent by the excellent and popular PBS series and, later, by the less successful Hollywood film.

But before Brideshead, Waugh's reputation was of a rather smart satirist of contemporary life, politics and morals during the 1920s and 1930s.

For no particular reason, I've just finished reading his first novel, Decline and Fall, written in 1928.  Waugh's tone in that book is, I would say, humorously mordant -- and certainly neither nostalgic nor pious.

Decline and Fall is an account of, well, the decline and fall, of the feckless young Paul Pennyfeather.  Briefly, Paul -- a quiet and studious theology student at a fictional Oxford college -- finds himself surrounded one night by a mob of drunken students on campus who, for their own amusement, remove his pants, forcing him to run for cover.  He is apprehended and "sent down" -- expelled -- for public indecency.  Desperate to support himself, he takes a position as an instructor at a small Welsh "college" -- prep school -- of questionable academic reputation.

While there, he falls in love with the glamorous mother of one of his students, who, days before their planned marriage, sends him on a business mission to Marseilles.  Paul discovers all too late that his fiancée's "business" is ownership and management of an international chain of brothels.  He is arrested, and his best friend from Oxford actively prosecutes the case against him.  His story, because of his relationship with his famous and well-loved fiancée becomes a national sensation.  They throw the book at him as an example to others.  He is sentenced to years of hard labor in prison.

Paul's most notable character trait is his mildness.  When asked why he left Oxford, Paul repeatedly states, without amplification, that he was sent down for "indecent behavior."  Fortunately, this charge hardly disqualified him from teaching school.  As he was told during his interview:

Well, I shall not ask for details.  I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious to conceal.

When arrested for unknowingly furthering a major prostitution ring, he admits guilt in order to protect his fiancée; when, while in prison, he is advised that the good lady plans to marry another man, he agrees that she is too fine a person to ever survive in prison.  He agrees not to  attempt to secure his own release by implicating her in any way.

In the hands of another writer, this story might conceivably have been presented as a rather shaky tragedy; for Waugh, on the other hand, it is all the grist of farce -- a mere framework on which to display the author's humors and prejudices and witty writing.

For example, look at how the English headmaster of Paul's Welsh prep school portrays the country in which he now finds himself:

From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people.  It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity.  Their sons and daughters mate freely with sheep but not with human kind except their own blood relations. 

The townspeople do nothing to rebut the headmaster's view of them as the British equivalent of stereotypical Kentucky hillbillies:

There was a baying and growling and yapping as of the jungle at moonrise, and presently he [a Welsh musician] came forward again with an obsequious, sidelong shuffle.

"Three pounds you pay us would you said indeed to at the sports play."

But the Welsh are only an incidental target of Waugh's scorn.  It is the English upper classes who are most ridiculed -- effectively if less broadly.  The Oxford "club" members who caused Paul's expulsion are portrayed in a manner that puts to shame the best efforts of American fraternity members on a warm Friday night:

It was a lovely evening.  They broke up Mr. Austen's grand piano, and stamped Lord Rending's cigars into his carpet, and smashed his china, and tore up Mr. Partridge's sheets, and threw the Matisse into his lavatory.  Mr. Sanders had nothing to break except his windows, but they found the manuscript at which he had been working for the Newdigate Prize Poem, and had great fun with that.  Sir Alastair Digby Vaine-Trumpington felt quite ill with excitement, and was supported to bed by Lumsden of Strathdrummond.

Somehow, I suspect I'm giving my readers an impression that Decline and Fall is a thoroughly unpleasant book.  They will have to take my word for it that, in fact, it is a very funny book.  It would be even funnier if we today had a clearer picture of some of the excesses of British society that are being satirized -- but we certainly can catch the general drift.

Waugh, who could with some fairness be described as a reactionary snob, was asked in later years how he -- a Catholic convert -- could reconcile his chronic unpleasantness with his profession of Christianity.  His reply is famous:

You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.

To his credit, Waugh did make some effort in Decline and Fall -- after chronicling poor Paul Pennyfeather's steady decline and freefall throughout the entire novel -- to avoid total nastiness by cobbling together a "happy" ending in the final chapter.  After conveyance of tactfully presented bribes originating with his former fiancée, Paul is surreptitiously whisked out of prison, his death is feigned, and he slips off to Corfu to bide his time.  He returns with a mustache and re-enters Oxford as a freshman.  He doesn't even bother to change his name.

Not even the mustache was really necessary.  Paul Pennyfeather had been a mild student, and as such he returns.  No one much remembers him, or pays attention to his return.  He happily and mildly goes back to his religious studies.