THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

exposes the surface values and the cynicism of the thoroughly modern and essentially metropolitan ‘bright young
things’. It moves between a seedy Arthurian-Victorian country house, to glib London clubs and smart apartments, to a
Brighton hotel, and to the uncharted equatorial forests of South America, each of them significant re-presentations of
aspects of Eliot’s poem. Literally and figuratively it centres on the idea of divorce, a divorce between old and new
values and divorce as the legal end to marriage which was very much an aspect of upper-class social relationships at
the time of its publication. The novel ends with the rootless and defeated Tony Last trapped in the jungle by the
calculating, half crazed Mr Todd who forces him to read and reread Dickens’s novels aloud to him: ‘Your head aches
does it not ... We will not have any Dickens today ... but tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Let
us read Little Dorrit again. There are passages in that book I can never hear without the temptation to weep.’ Without
itself being insistently ‘Modernist’, A Handful of Dust is shaped around some of the most troubling juxtapositions,
fragmentations, and allusions in English literature.
Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945) reworks and
reconsiders the thematic tensions of A Handful of Dust in the
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context of Britain in the Second World War. Here again was the romantic country house (though now baroque rather
than Gothic) and here again was the clash of tradition with the modern fragmentations of the family and of society.
What has shifted is Waugh’s narrative perspective. Where the earlier novel was referential, Brideshead is essentially
reverential. Waugh’s narrator, Charles Ryder, is both the central actor in the plot and the far from detached observer
and recorder of its action. It is Ryder who is required both to observe and to translate his experience from an agnostic
negativity into a series of barely grasped Catholic positives. The harsh outlines of the ironies and unresolved
oppositions of Waugh’s earlier fiction now seem blurred by a dim religious light. Although Ryder’s retrospect traces
the effective decline of an aristocratic family, the final extension of his memories into the present allows for the
momentary triumph of the ancient and the continuous over the modern and the ephemeral, of the flickering of a
sanctuary lamp over the middle-brow popularism that Ryder identifies as ‘Hooperism’. Despite its overall mood of
nostalgia, Brideshead remains a more open and subtle novel than its critics often allow. When in the latter part of his
career the convert Waugh adopted the role of amateur apologist for Roman Catholic teaching, as he did in his
historical novel Helena (1950) and in his biographies of Edmund Campion (1935) and Ronald Knox (1959), his
universal sense of the ridiculous tended to desert him and to be superseded by a pompous and exclusive piety. The old
detached and dust-haunted Waugh blazed into satiric life one more time, however, in the short fantasia on the
eccentricities of Californian funerary practices, The Loved One (1948). Otherwise the tone of his late fiction seems to
have been determined by an often agonized Augustinian awareness of sin and human failure. The ambitious Sword of
Honour trilogy (Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961)) traces the
disappointments of another Catholic patrician, Guy Crouchback, as an army officer muddling through a decidedly unheroic
and often pathetic series of experiences during the Second World War. Though it is a far cry from the ideals of
chivalric patriotism that he initially seeks to embody, Crouchback’s basic decency emerges as a spot of civilized
brightness in what Waugh portrays as an increasingly dismal world.
In a review of Waugh’s Vile Bodies in the Daily Sketch in January 1930 Rebecca West recognized that the novel
had ‘a very considerable value as a further stage in the contemporary literature of disillusionment’ and that it followed
in a new tradition, first established by The Waste Land and continued by Aldous Huxley’s novels Crome Yellow
(1921), Antic Hay (1923), and Those Barren Leaves (1925). Waugh rarely appreciated comparisons between his work
and that of Huxley (1894-1963). He found Point Counter Point (1928) a rehash of Antic Hay with ‘all the same social
uncertainties, bored lovemaking ... [and] odd pages of conversation and biology’. There are, however, certain obvious
parallels between the satirical pictures of the self conscious pursuit of modernity by a young, smart set in the work of
both novelists in the 1920s. Thereafter, their
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styles and subjects diverge radically. As the derivations of Huxley’s titles from phrases of Shakespeare, Bacon,
Milton, and Marvell imply, he was, like Waugh, self consciously ‘literary’. Unlike Waugh, he initially shaped his
novels on the model of the densely conversational, country-house symposia of Thomas Love Peacock; as his
experiments with form became more elaborate, so did his tendency to explore ideas at the expense of action. Point
Counter Point is particularly intricately constructed. As suggested by its title, it attempts to investigate an analogy
with musical counterpoint by offering glimpses of diverse experience which seem to be observed simultaneously.
Huxley’s ‘musicalization of fiction ... on a large scale, in the construction’ is explained by one of his characters,
Philip Quarles, a novelist-within-the-novel: ‘A theme is stated, then developed, pushed out of shape, imperceptibly
deformed, until, though still recognizably the same, it has become different ... All you need is a sufficiency of