Books, Arts & Manners: The View from the Wall

Confused Roaring: Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition, by George McCartney (Indiana, 191 pp., $22.50)

There is something amiss with the title of this book, suggesting as it does that Evelyn Waugh is the Confused Roarer when, in fact, the roaring is that of “acoustic [modern] primitivism in which the individual dissolves into the communal mass,” according to Mr. McCartney. Other than that, I can find nothing wrong with this brilliant (and superbly written) work of literary criticism, which succeeds absolutely in refuting the view of critics like Donat O’Donnell (Conor Cruise O’Brien), Frederick J. Stopp, Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, and Sean O’Faolain that Waugh was, in McCartney’s gloss, “a sharper-tongued Wodehouse, a more substantial Firbank”; or, as O’Faolain put it, “a purely brainless genius, with a gift for satire,” whose work adds up merely to a manic exercise in Edwardian nostalgia, without rationale. The truth is that Waugh himself flatly denied that what he wrote was satire at all, arguing that the genre “flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous moral standards. … It exposes polite cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue.” To the extent that Waugh does deserve to be thought of as a satirist, McCartney argues, “It must first be said that his satiric objective was not moral but metaphysical and it is on this ground that his work achieves its consistency of purpose.”

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

Featured Tags

Confused Roaring: Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition, by George McCartney (Indiana, 191 pp., $22.50)

There is something amiss with the title of this book, suggesting as it does that Evelyn Waugh is the Confused Roarer when, in fact, the roaring is that of “acoustic [modern] primitivism in which the individual dissolves into the communal mass,” according to Mr. McCartney. Other than that, I can find nothing wrong with this brilliant (and superbly written) work of literary criticism, which succeeds absolutely in refuting the view of critics like Donat O’Donnell (Conor Cruise O’Brien), Frederick J. Stopp, Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, and Sean O’Faolain that Waugh was, in McCartney’s gloss, “a sharper-tongued Wodehouse, a more substantial Firbank”; or, as O’Faolain put it, “a purely brainless genius, with a gift for satire,” whose work adds up merely to a manic exercise in Edwardian nostalgia, without rationale. The truth is that Waugh himself flatly denied that what he wrote was satire at all, arguing that the genre “flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous moral standards. … It exposes polite cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue.” To the extent that Waugh does deserve to be thought of as a satirist, McCartney argues, “It must first be said that his satiric objective was not moral but metaphysical and it is on this ground that his work achieves its consistency of purpose.”