Waugh By Jeet Heer National Post (September 23, 2004) You have to be a little bit masochistic to love Evelyn Waugh. His lacerating satire was most often aimed at the very people who tend to read his books. For nearly eight decades, hip and fashionable young people have treasured Waugh, even as they discover grotesque versions of themselves in his fiction. My National Post colleague Shinan Govani is a good example of the Waugh paradox. A big Waugh fan, the gossip columnist threw a party last night to celebrate the release of Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry’s adaptation of Waugh’s 1930 novel Vile Bodies. When I was re-reading Vile Bodies recently, I was stuck by the fact that the novel is filled with gossip columnists, almost all of whom suffer greatly. One is kicked out of an important social event and commits suicide, another has to flee the country (possibly because he’s gay) and a third is fired for making up stories about how the hot new fashion in green bowler hats. Eventually Adam Fenwick-Symes (the “green bowler hats” chap) ends up as a soldier in a desolate battlefield. I hope providence is kinder to Shinan than Waugh was to those who ply the gossip trade. The Waugh paradox has become especially sharp since Waugh’s death in 1966. Increasingly, his novels are celebrated by the very people he was chilliest to in life, especially t.v. producers, filmmakers and North American anglophiles. Although there had been earlier adaptations, the 1981 miniseries Brideshead Revisited marked the beginning of this appropriation of Waugh’s legacy. Once described as the “WASP version of Roots”, Brideshead Revisited wasn’t just a lengthy and lugubrious TV series. It was also a way of life and a wardrobe guide. As soon as it went into the endless loop of public television (always re-run on pledge drive week), Waugh joined Ralph Lauren in the pantheon of preppy Gods. In places like King’s College in Halifax and Dartmouth College in New Haven, unripe undergraduates adopted all the boozy affectations of early 20th century Anglo-Catholicism: sipping sherry, whiffing incense during Mass, donning argyle socks, wearing smoking jackets at the dinner table, sporting spats, and bemoaning the degeneracy of modern life. What started as satire in Waugh became an all too earnest reality on campus greens all across the former British colonies. (In the mother country, people were much more likely to understand that Waugh enjoyed the old leg-pull). After Brideshead came a steady stream of Waugh adaptations: Scoop (1987), A Handful of Dust (1988), Swords of Honor (2001) and now Bright Young Things. In production is a new version of Brideshead, alas a popular novel among Waugh’s more humourless fans (His 1934 book A Handful of Dust was his real masterpiece). It doesn’t take a genius to grasp why Waugh is so beloved of filmmakers. On a superficial level he was a very cinematic novelist: his plots are antic and inventive, his dialogue crisp, his setting glamorous, and his characters screen-friendly (especially the London party animals that populate his early books). At their best, the Waugh adaptations capture the surface of Waugh’s world very well: the tipsy glitter of a jazz age party. (Bright Young Things has been widely celebrated as the best Waugh movie yet for this very quality). Yet in re-reading Waugh, I can’t help but notice how much he loves needling the movie world. In Vile Bodies, a shady producer named Isaacs recruits a production crew of amateurs to staff a bio-pic devoted to John Wesley, the 18th century founder of the Methodist church. “It is the most important All-Talkie super-religious film to be produced solely in this country by British artists and management and by British capital,” runs Isaacs spiel. “It has been directed throughout regardless of difficulty and expense, and supervised by a staff of expert historians and theologians. Nothing has been omitted that would contribute to the meticulous accuracy of every detail. The life of the great social and religious reformer John Wesley is for the first time portrayed to a British public in all its humanity and tragedy.” As a parody of film world hype, this remains dead-on accurate. Aside from being more literate than contemporary prose, it could have come out of a public relations office yesterday. A lot of Waugh’s wit comes from a deadpan verbal precision that is almost impossible to translate into film. Here is the aftermath of an informal bash: “But her party was breaking up. The Major was gone. Judge Skimp was sleeping, his fine white hair in an ashtray. Adam and Miss Runcible were talking about where they would dine.” What’s wonderful here is how low-key the sentence about Judge Skimp is; it becomes funnier precisely by avoiding attention. After going to another party, Adam and friends return to the same scene. “They went up to Judge Skimp’s suite, but there had been a disaster there with a chandelier that one of his young ladies had tried to swing on. They were bathing her forehead with champagne; two of them were asleep.” Again, it is the coolness of the prose, a blasé pose even in an outrageous world, that makes these sentences sparkle. As it turns out the chandelier “disaster” proves to be fatal, but no one raises his voice about it. Waugh’s characters are almost always stoic about other people’s pain. Amusing as it, the world they inhabit is really a kind of hell. This makes all the more powerful the rare moments when a character displays tenderness or fellow-feeling, as in the doomed love affair between Adam Fenwick-Symes and Nina Blount in Vile Bodies. Yet, as Shinan Govani rightly pointed out to me, Waugh cherishes his characters, even though they are great sinners and rarely love each other. Waugh converted to Catholicism the same year he wrote Vile Bodies. In his later novels, his faith would become an all pervasive presence, often making him hectoring and moralistic. In Vile Bodies we have something more interesting: a novelist in transition, balancing worldly wit and transcendental concerns. It is this tension between the profane world of parties and the sacred realm of the soul that marks Waugh’s best work.