Evelyn Waugh, In Memoriam

In 1929, in Paris, the young Evelyn Waugh observed through a taxi window the spectacle of a man in the Place Beauveau whose umbrella had caught fire. “He was a man of middle age and, to judge by his bowler hat and frock coat, of the official class.. . . I . . . saw him in the center of a small crowd, grasping it still by the handle and holding it at arm’s length so that the flames should not scorch him. It was a dry day and the umbrella burnt flamboyantly. I followed the scene as long as I could from the little window in the back of the car, and saw him finally drop the handle and push it, with his foot, into the gutter. It lay there smoking, and the crowd peered at it curiously before moving off.”

Imagine Kafka’s dealings with such a scene; then imagine Salvador Dali’s. Conceive the Phlegethon of adjectival vividness with which Dickens would have inundated this modest conflagration; the reverberant ironies it would have elicited from Conrad; the layered nuances behind which Henry James, O.M., would have obscured that stark flame. And consider Waugh’s treatment: a half dozen workmanlike sentences. The mad thing exacted from him no corresponding madness: no wit: no rhetoric: not inflation nor yet the tedious meiosis that diminishes the Normandy landings to “a bit of a dust-up”: merely statement soberly adequated to event.

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Hugh Kenner

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In 1929, in Paris, the young Evelyn Waugh observed through a taxi window the spectacle of a man in the Place Beauveau whose umbrella had caught fire. “He was a man of middle age and, to judge by his bowler hat and frock coat, of the official class.. . . I . . . saw him in the center of a small crowd, grasping it still by the handle and holding it at arm’s length so that the flames should not scorch him. It was a dry day and the umbrella burnt flamboyantly. I followed the scene as long as I could from the little window in the back of the car, and saw him finally drop the handle and push it, with his foot, into the gutter. It lay there smoking, and the crowd peered at it curiously before moving off.”

Imagine Kafka’s dealings with such a scene; then imagine Salvador Dali’s. Conceive the Phlegethon of adjectival vividness with which Dickens would have inundated this modest conflagration; the reverberant ironies it would have elicited from Conrad; the layered nuances behind which Henry James, O.M., would have obscured that stark flame. And consider Waugh’s treatment: a half dozen workmanlike sentences. The mad thing exacted from him no corresponding madness: no wit: no rhetoric: not inflation nor yet the tedious meiosis that diminishes the Normandy landings to “a bit of a dust-up”: merely statement soberly adequated to event.