Some aspects of Evelyn Waugh's style

Whatever one thinks of Waugh's political and religious beliefs, few would deny that he was one of the great stylists of the English language in the twentieth century. Indeed, many would put him at the top of the list with Brideshead Revisited as the greatest novel. It is certainly one of my favourite books, one I cannot imagine myself ever tiring of.

It would be useful to note here in connection with the previous comment how well that style suited and enhanced the force of his satires. The following comments on Waugh's style are from Douglas Patey's critical biography, The Life of Evelyn Waugh. It was the last of these passages (p. 52) that particularly impressed me about writing satire, and became my lead in writing Screwing a Deal: A Satire in the Style of Evelyn Waugh.

[Rebecca] West admired [Label's] arresting voice, its ability to teach through compressed wit. The author of Rosetti was already master of neatly surprising verbal formulation…; of the inverted cliché…; and of the impertinent generalization… Carefully planted phrases (or single sentence paragraphs inserted between longer ones) shift levels of diction, usually for the purposes of satiric deflation…All these passages instance Waugh’s lifelong habit of formal mixture, his gift for putting elements from different rhetorical registers and generic kinds side by side. p. 21

[Waugh had a] deep belief that psychology itself, especially psychoanalysis, is a sham: ‘Voodo, Bog-magic,’ he told an interviewer inn 1949; ‘Like the word slenderizing. There isn’t such a word. The whole thing’s a fraud.’ When another interviewer asked too closely about his characters’ thoughts, Waugh replied: ‘But look, I think that your questions are dealing too much with the creation of character and not enough with the techniques of writing. I regard writing not as investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language…I have no technical psychological interest.’ p. 36

For an author whose primary ways of generating humour and meaning are clever juxtapositions and shifts of tone, it is a perfect choice [for travel writing]. p. 44

Modernist style in the service of endangered tradition is also the method of Waugh’s first novels. p. 49

Early in 1929 [Waugh] praised Ronald Firbank for having solved ‘the aesthetic problem of representation in fiction’ without adopting a merely ‘subjective attitude to his material.’ Portraying his characters ‘objectively’, from the outside, Firbank avoided what Waugh later called the ‘presumption and exorbitance’ of examining character only in terms of individual psychology, not in relation to the larger systems that give it meaning. p.52

Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com