At least 10 years have gone by since I’ve read a little Waugh. And that, my friend, is simply no good. I’d forgotten more of Evelyn than I’d remembered. From what I could recall, he was a serious writer with serious stories about the decline and fall of a way of life. The sort of writer who picked up the last handful of dust and pondered loss with a heavy heart and civilized snifter of sherry. And when Tony wound up in the jungle, I always found it odd, over-the-top, goofy.
Fact is, the jungle made sense. I’d forgotten just how Wilde he could be. Nonsense is not just another element of his writing, it’s a critical component of his continual commentary, a Yin to his Catholic and Cultured Yang.
In Put Out More Flags, Waugh applies the same deconstructable style to the most hallowed of recent human endeavors: the Greatest Generation’s Band of Brothers who laid down life itself to bash back against the buzz-bombing Nazi threat. His descriptions of the inner workings of Her Majesty’s Royal Forces are Kafkaesque; his soldiers are well-meaning but ill-informed; his recurring characters are by turns self-centered, aloof, removed. But things do turn serious as the war heats up, and there is maturation and growth all around. And things do turn serious for Waugh as he introduces and replays a new theme mid-novel:
“Culture must cease to be conventual and become cenobitic.”
Waugh sketches out a contrast between the mind of the modern European man (excited to be wrapped up and bound up and swept away by the latest line of thought, be it Nazism or any other sort of less-destructive fashion or fever) and the the life of a Chinese monk content to think his own thoughts in solitude without being chained to the greater collective (un)conscious.
Applied to the present conflict, he continues:
“The great weapons of modern war did not count in single lives; it took a whole section to make a target worth a burst of machine-gun fire; a platoon or a motor lorry worth a bomb. No one had anything against the individual; as long as he was alone he was free and safe; there’s a danger in numbers; divided we stand, united we fall…”
To sum, the cenobitic culture would not form an army, would not drop a bomb, would not round up the Jews, and would not Put Out More Flags. However, it would produce plenty of snarky fiction and the time to really read it.
Perhaps we all just want to re-create the world in our own image.
man, i’m appreciating you.
hey joshua — thanks very much for the appreciation. my sophomoric literary posts are usually purely for my own pleasure. glad to see someone else is enjoying a little of my fun.
g.