‘I think there would be something wrong with a middle-aged man who could take pleasure in Firbank’. That, more or less, was Evelyn Waugh’s judgement in the interview he accorded the Paris Review in the mid-Fifties. (I say ‘more or less’ because I can’t lay my hands on that volume of the interviews, but if the words are not exact, the sense is). Yet Firbank had, as he admitted , influenced him when young, along with Hemingway, who had also, as Waugh observed, developed ‘the technical discoveries upon which Ronald Firbank so negligently stumbled’.
That quotation, unlike perhaps my first one, is accurate, for it is taken from an admiring essay on Firbank’s work which Waugh wrote in 1929. He had reservations even then: ‘His coy naughtiness about birches and pretty boys will bore most people with its repetition’; and he admitted that ‘even among critics of culture and intelligence there will, no doubt, always be many to whom his work will remain essentially repugnant’. Nevertheless ‘condemnation of him implies . . . distaste for a wide and vigorous tendency in modern fiction’.
Though the young Waugh may himself have delighted in the naughtiness that such critics found repugnant, for his own homosexual phase was not long behind him, it was probably the simpering frivolity of Firbank’s treatment of sex which came to irritate him in middle age. But his chief interest in 1929 was in what he called Firbank’s ‘technical peculiarities’, which had enabled him to find a solution to ‘the aesthetic problem of representation in fiction’. He had achieved ‘a new, balanced interrelation of subject and form.’ His later novels were ‘almost devoid of any attributions of cause to effect; there is the barest minimum of direct description; his compositions are built up, intricately and with a balanced alternation of the wildest extravagance and the most austere economy, with conversational nuances’.
This, minus the ‘wildest extravagances’, was what Hemingway was also doing in his early short stories, which remain perhaps his best work, and it was what Waugh himself was to do in Vile Bodies and Black Mischief, with the wildest extravagances restored there. His debt to Firbank was considerable. ‘In his dialogue there is no exchange of opinion. His art is purely selective.’ These early Waugh novels are often called satires, and there is indeed a satirical element. But they are principally exercises in style. ‘Exchange of opinion’ is as rare in these novels as in Firbank’s.
Waugh continued to maintain that he was not interested in an investigation of character, but regarded writing as ‘an exercise in the use of language’; it was ‘speech, drama, and events’ that interested him. Doubtless this was true. Nevertheless, from Brideshead onwards, and most certainly in the Sword of Honour trilogy, one can see that themes and content have come to matter more to him. He is now as interested in what he has to say as in how he says it. The aesthete has not been suppressed by the moralist, but he is yoked to him.
In that Firbank essay he wrote of the novelist being ‘fettered to cause and effect’, just as ‘in painting till the last generation the aesthetically significant activity of the artist had always to be occasioned by anecdote and representation’ — precisely the kind of paintings that Waugh would collect in middle age. He had come by then a long way from the boy who wrote ‘In Defence of Cubism’ and declared that ‘the resemblance to life does not in the least concern the merits of the picture’.
It is natural, perhaps because it is reassuring, to suppose that one’s taste improves, one’s appreciation deepens and one’s judgment becomes wiser as one grows older; natural to think that one becomes a better reader. Sometimes we may. In How Fiction Works James Wood says, ‘I know from my own old books, wantonly annotated 20 years ago when I was a student, that I routinely underlined for approval details and images and metaphors that now strike me as commonplace, while serenely missing things which now seem wonderful.’ No doubt this also is true. Yet, with the passing of time, a fresh and generous response to literature may be lost. If, for example, Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay now seems to me verbose, ponderous and too often tiresome, does this mean I am wiser than my 18-year-old self who found it entrancing? If Swinburne no longer delights as he did when I was young, does this signify that he is a lesser poet than I thought him then, or am I perhaps lesser than I was when the choruses of ‘Atalanta in Corydon’ sent the spirit dancing? If poets, Swinburne among them, may deteriorate with age, perhaps we, as readers, may do so also? Was Waugh’s 1929 delight in Firbank a sign of immaturity or is the middle-aged novelist’s rejection of him evidence of a form of critical arterio-sclerosis?
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