—The Times newspaper has published an article by Max Hastings on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII. In it Hastings explains:
Almost five decades after publishing my first book about war, I am no longer much interested in generals. Instead I study the doings of humbler participants, some of them sensitive enough to try to say sorry when they shoot people. My new book, Sword: D-Day — Trial by Battle, focuses upon the experiences of infantrymen, commandos, paratroops, engineers and tank crews in one corner of the D-Day landing areas.
Hastings also offers this contribution from one of Waugh’s books about the war:
…The dream of most soldiers was not to win glory but instead to return to their old lives in offices and factories, homes and schools, on beaches where they might build sandcastles with the children they dreamt of fathering.
They had been plucked from mostly humdrum but at least sheltered lives, jobs and families to experience sun, rain, snow and mud in hutted encampments or on wasteland training areas, often in the company of men with whom they had little sympathy.
Tobruk and Alamein, Stalingrad and Kursk, Sicily and Salerno came and went, yet in England men repeated the same routines, fatigues, exercises, drills. “Most of war seems to consist of hanging about,” says an officer in Evelyn Waugh’s fictional 1942 portrait, Put Out More Flags…
Hastings makes much the same point in a “Diary” article in this week’s Spectator entitled “Bring on the Trump protests” quoting the same Waugh passage.
–Hastings also takes part in another Times WWII literary exercise. Along with William Boyd and Antonia Senior, they were asked to choose the best WWII novels. Boyd and Hastings each chose 5 and Senior, 4. They somehow agreed that no novel would appear on more than one list and this must have involved some haggling. Boyd included Waugh’s Sword of Honour on his list and also wrote an introductory discussion in which he noted that if one were dealing with WWI’s best literary works it would discuss poetry rather than novels. Here’s what he says about Waugh’s selected war novel:
…Many classic novels emerged from [WWII], written from lived experience on many fronts and in many dimensions. Evelyn Waugh was a commando officer in Crete in 1941 and wrote about the debacle of the defeat and the subsequent shambolic evacuation in his Sword of Honour trilogy. Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day is about London during the Blitz and the unmasking of a Nazi spy. HH Kirst in his drily brilliant sequence of Gunner Asch novels details the mundane travails of a lowly private in an artillery regiment on the Russian front; Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead is a grim GI’s view of the war against Japan in the South Pacific.
All these authors were, in effect, transforming their autobiographical experiences of the war into fiction. The novel provided the perfect template. Waugh’s trilogy could be subtitled as: “What Evelyn Waugh did between 1939 and 1945.” His wartime experiences are seen through the eyes of a diffident Catholic gentleman called Guy Crouchback — a man who went to war with high ideals but finds them repeatedly dashed and compromised.
Waugh’s example is significant. If there is anything that unites the novels written out of the Second World War experience it is a form of remorseless demythologising. The tone is disillusioned, cynical, clear-eyed. Anything heroic, gung-ho or worthy is banished. War is intermittently hellish and randomly terrifying; otherwise it is mindbogglingly boring and frustrating, not to say surreal and absurd…
Here’s a link to the article.
–Annie Kapur writing in the website Geeks discusses Clive James’s views of Waugh’s writings as published in James’s Reliable Essays. Here is the opening paragraph:
I don’t know whether I’ve explained this before but Evelyn Waugh is perhaps one of the most perfect examples of separating the art from the artist. We can’t deny that Brideshead Revisited is one of the best novels of the 20th century but we can also accept it was written by a man who was probably not in his right mind most of the time. Clive James starts this same analysis off with the fact that all Waugh novel fans love: his hatred of the telephone. James sets up Waugh’s hatred of modernity as part and parcel of expanding his personality into the depths of his letters. It is clear we are dealing with an ageing Evelyn Waugh who is less in his right mind than he was before:
“Here is yet one more reason to thank Evelyn Waugh for his hatred of the modern world. If he had not loathed the telephone, he might have talked all this way.”
The full article is available at this link.
–An essay about how Waugh’s Brideshead relates to “Dark Academia” is published on the website TimesNowNews. This is by Girish Shukla and opens with this:
Long before “dark academia” became a celebrated aesthetic — all moody libraries, tweed jackets, whispered Latin, and philosophical brooding — there was ‘Brideshead Revisited’ by Evelyn Waugh. Published in 1945, it was a massive bestseller, capturing the imagination of a generation dealing with the aftermath of war. Yet today, when people talk about dark academia, they often forget that Waugh had already written one of its earliest, most haunting masterpieces.
‘Brideshead Revisited’ wasn’t just popular; it was a phenomenon. Readers were drawn to its lush prose, its melancholic nostalgia for a lost aristocratic England, and its depiction of intense, complicated relationships forged in the rarefied atmosphere of Oxford University. In many ways, it offered the full dark academia package decades before the term even existed: privileged but crumbling institutions, emotional decay beneath a veneer of sophistication, an obsession with beauty and tragedy, and young intellectuals lost in a maze of ideals, guilt, and longing…
