Highest of Standards (Put Out More Flags - Evelyn Waugh)

Member Name: amygdala

Product:	Put Out More Flags - Evelyn Waugh
Date:	22/08/00 (101 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Little-known and extremely funny.

Disadvantages: I may have just helped to make it a little less little-known.

Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) possesses the inestimable advantages of being the best writer in English of the twentieth century and not being attractive to the EngLit crowd. He was a conservative Catholic snob, after all, and though many people come to him because they are one or another of those things, or all three, I’m not one of them. I love him because he writes so well – so cleverly and, often, so cruelly.

But he is still famous and so I prefer one of his more obscure books, published in 1942 and rarely mentioned with the inevitable Brideshead Revisited (probably one of his weaker books) and Vile Bodies (certainly his weakest one, after Helena) when his work is summarized. The first few pages have probably convinced many people that it's justly obscure, but if you can get beyond them you find POMF one of his funniest books – and the quality of those opening pages will be plain on the re-reading of the book I’m sure you’ll undertake if you finish it.

Quotation from POMF would be difficult and I don't intend to try: Waugh was not only a consummate prose stylist but also a Grand Maître of literary cabinetwork, and detaching individual sentences or paragraphs would be rather like wrenching a leg or handle off a Louis Quinze appliqué table and exhibiting it for isolated admiration. Suffice it to say that the book is Waugh in excelsis: snobbish, malicious, and extremely funny, and Basil Seal, the returning anti-hero of Black Mischief, is the primum mobile of the novel's two great comedic set pieces: the peculatory exploitation of a trio of gruesome evacuee children called the Connollys, and the enforced exile of Ambrose Silk, a homosexual Jewish aesthete modelled, doubtless very uncomfortably for the two of them, on two men Waugh had met at Oxford, Harold Acton and Brian Howard.

Like almost all of Waugh's characters, Basil Seal is a character à clef too, but the sting of any possible offence caused by
him to the models in real life was drawn by what Waugh said was one of the great literary truths. He once said that it is possible to ascribe the most rebarbative behaviour and morals to a character based on a friend or acquaintance and cause no offence so long as one also makes the character attractive to women. Basil is a complete shit, utterly self-centred, utterly selfish, and also something of a bore. He is, however, attractive to women. By all accounts this prophylaxis worked, and all facets of his character are on dazzling display in this best-kept secret of an unsurpassable œuvre.

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