THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

good manners of a polite and often repressed society. It is, however, through these flat, claustrophobic dialogues that
there emerge the deceptions, frauds, and the often melodramatic surprises on which the novels turn. Crimes, imagined
and realized,
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await exposure, and murders, committed or contrived, serve to satisfy the demands either of vengeance or of
selfishness. Compton-Burnett’s fictional style can be an acquired taste, requiring as it does a susceptibility educated to
respond to her distinctive but subdued acidity.
Bright Young Things and Brave New Worlds: Wodehouse, Waugh, and Huxley
The eccentricities, oddities, fogyisms, fads, and fashions of inter-war upper-class England are nowhere better charted
than in P. G. Wodehouse’s mockery of them. Between 1902 and the end of his life P(elham) G(renville) Wodehouse
(1881-1975) published over 120 volumes of novels and short stories. He first introduced his most famous characters,
Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves, in an unremarkable story in the collection The Man with Two Left Feet and Other
Stories in 1917. The modest collection itself is notable for its variety of narrators, which range from a dog to a
London waiter, and amongst them the Wooster narrative sits snugly and companionably. When, however, in 1919
Wodehouse began to explore further the potential of the disarmingly dim Bertie as a narrator and his relationship to
the resourceful Jeeves in My Man Jeeves, he took the classic master-servant partnerships of literature into a new era.
Here was a Samuel Pickwick and a Sam Weller advanced both in fortune and in class into the Jazz Age. Wodehouse’s
art lay in telling a simple and amusing story simply and amusingly. He once described his method of writing as
‘making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether’. Although Wodehouse’s is a
genuinely escapist fiction, it neither truly ignores ‘real’ life nor suggests an ignorance of the political and social
currents of its time. It identifies likely disturbers of the public peace in the guise of aunts and flapper feminists,
gangsters and arrivistes, cranks and enthusiasts, mindless bachelor members of the Drones Club and thuggish
followers of the Fascist Black Shorts movement, and it systematically deflates them all.
Despite the fun, there is far less geniality in the early fiction of Evelyn Waugh (1903-66). There is a menace even
in the titles of his first four novels, Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), and A
Handful of Dust (1934). Decline and Fall, with its Gibbonian suggestions of a society in decay, traces the disastrous
career of the innocent Paul Pennyfeather, a failed undergraduate, a failing schoolmaster, and the exploited lover of the
highly corrupt Margot Beste-Chetwynde (the future Margot Metroland). Sentenced to a term at the Egdon Heath
Penal Settlement (a Dartmoor in the midst of Hardy country) thanks to Margot’s white-slaving activities, Paul endures
his fate patiently. ‘Anyone who has been to an English public school’, the narrator wryly remarks, ‘will always feel
comparatively at home in prison.’ Throughout both Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, the accumulated evidence of
depravity is
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balanced by a comedy that sports not simply with human folly but with crime, injustice, and even potential horror. As
with Ben Jonson’s equally savage comedies or with Dickens’s comic inflations, venality embraces vulgarity and the
ridiculous frolics with the rapacious. In Vile Bodies the devaluation of received standards is typified by the filming of
a preposterous life of John Wesley in which Wesley and Whitefield fight a duel for the love of Selina, Countess of
Huntingdon. ‘This is going to make film history’, the director announces, ‘We’re recording extracts from Wesley’s
sermons and we’re singing all his own hymns.’ Black Mischief, set in the tottering African kingdom of Azania,
intermixes farcical representations of the Emperor’s birth-control campaign (‘Through Sterility to Culture’) with rum
accounts of civil war corruption, and mayhem which were imaginative expansions on the circumstances Waugh
himself had witnessed in Ethiopia. He had initially described his African journey in the travel-book Remote People in
1931; he returned to Ethiopia during the Italian invasion, publishing an account of his experiences as a journalist in
Waugh in Abyssinia in 1936 and a fictional enlargement on them in Scoop in 1938 (the novel is also a pointed satire
on a popular newspaper industry dominated by the opinionated Lord Copper). By far the finest, and the most refinedly
cruel, of the early novels is A Handful of Dust. The novel’s title amplified in its epigraph, reveals Waugh’s debt to the
bleakness of The Waste Land. Although it is quintessentially a commentary on ‘the way we live now’, it also glances
back, both in terms of form and in reference, to the moral strictures on the decay of social responsibility in the works
of Dickens and Trollope. A Handful of Dust explores the painful collapse of the illusions and complacencies of a rural
feudalism, represented by Tony Last (whose name may reflect the passing orders of Bulwer-Lytton’s titles), and it