A man getting drunk at a farewell party should strike a musical tone, in order to strengthen his spirit . . . and a drunk military man should order gallons and put out more flags in order to increase his military splendour…
What do Bright Young Things do when war is declared?
That’s the story Evelyn Waugh tells in Put Out More Flags. He brings some of his characters from previous novels of dissolute, privileged Englishmen and women into 1939-40, the year of England’s entrance into World War II. There’s not much hindsight here – the book was published 1942 – which makes it doubly interesting, I think, as an exaggerated, ridiculous, but still almost journalistic record of this class during this period.
Since this is Waugh, you know you are not getting a gentle cosy. The satire is sharp and the humor dark. The characterization is not very deep, but, since this is Waugh, glints of humanity shine through, even a bit of pathos here and there.
Here’s what Waugh does, and why I enjoy reading him: he writes sharply and cleanly about human behavior, excising human foibles and weakness and verbally laying them out for us with witty succinctness. It’s poetic at times. And yes, it’s mean, but guess what? We deserve it. You can look at Waugh’s world and say, “Well, that’s not fair. There’s more to it than that.” Of course there is. But the bits of life Waugh shows us are, indeed, there – we can’t deny it – and so we might as well face it.
So that’s what we have: A group of highly privileged, fairly lazy men and women who find themselves at the beginning of a war. It’s actually rather thrilling, isn’t it?
“Tell us all about the war,” said Sonia.
“Well — ” Basil began.
“No, darling, I didn’t mean that. Not all. Not about who’s going to win or why we are fighting. Tell us what everyone is going to do about it. From what Margot tells me the last war was absolute heaven. Alastair wants to go for a soldier.”
“Conscription has rather taken the gilt off that particular gingerbread,” said Basil. “Besides, this isn’t go- ing to be a soldier’s war.”
“Poor Peter,” said Sonia, as though she were talking to one of the puppies. “It isn’t going to be your war, sweetheart.”
“Suits me,” said Peter.
“No one seems interested in my scheme to annex Liberia.”
“Beasts.”
“No imagination. They won’t take suggestions from outsiders. You know, Sonia, this war is developing into a kind of club enclosure on a race-course. If you aren’t wearing the right badge they won’t let you in.”
“I think that’s rather what Alastair felt.”
“It’s going to be a long war. There’s plenty of time. I shall wait until there’s something amusing to do.”
“I don’t believe it’s going to be that kind of war.”
This was February 1940, in that strangely cosy interlude between peace and war, when there was leave every week-end and plenty to eat and drink and plenty to smoke, when France stood firm on the Maginot Line and the Finns stood firm in Finland, and every- one said what a cruel winter they must be having in Germany.
Who are the characters? Well, there are a lot, but these were the most notable to me:
Angela Lynes is one of Waugh’s stronger female characters, rather complex and mysterious. She’s married, has been the lover of Basil Seal (more on him in a moment), but is clearly different from the other women around her. She’s more serious (which Waugh shorthands, as he would, as being “like a man.”), and she’s more deeply impacted by the looming clouds than others are, a reaction Waugh sketches indirectly, as we watch her be absorbed in the news, grow more reclusive and drink more.
She stayed to the end of the party and then returned to Grosvenor Square alone. Since the war there was no lift-man on duty after midnight. She shut herself in, pressed the button for the mansard floor and rose to the empty, uncommunicative flat. There were no ashes to stir in the grate; illuminated glass coals glowed eternally in an elegant steel basket; the temperature of the rooms never varied, winter or summer, day or night. She mixed herself a large whiskey and water and turned on the radio.
Tirelessly, all over the world, voices were speaking in their own and in foreign tongues. She listened and fidgeted with the knob; sometimes she got a burst of music, once a prayer. Presently she fetched another whiskey and water.
Ambrose Silk is an interesting character, whose portrayal would doubtless offend many. He’s a Jewish homosexual writer, a bit stereotyped as weak, easily manipulated and living in a bubble of romantic yearning – romantic in the broadest sense.
Waugh does, however, give Ambrose a scene with some of the most poignant writing in the book, one which is almost breathtaking in the gentle, but powerful metaphor for the artist’s fraught relationship to his or her work and life:
Here Ambrose settled, in the only bedroom whose windows were unbroken. Here he intended to write a book, to take up again the broken fragments of his artistic life. He spread foolscap paper on the dining-room table; and the soft, moist air settled on it and permeated it so that when, on the third day, he sat down to make a start, the ink spread and the lines ran together, leaving what might have been a brush stroke of indigo paint where there should have been a sentence of prose. Ambrose laid down the pen, and because the floor sloped where the house had settled, it rolled down the table, and down the floor-boards and under the mahogany sideboard, and lay there among napkin rings and small coins and corks and the sweepings of half a century. And Ambrose wandered out into the mist and the twilight, stepping soundlessly on the soft, green turf.
And then we have Basil Seal. Put Out More Flags is stuffed with characters going in all sorts of different directions, but the cynical Basil Seal outshines them all in his ability to never let a crisis go to waste.
His two major exploits involve:
- Developing a scheme, based out of his family’s country estate, to make a fairly steady income from serial placement of three horrible evacuee children.
- Making a name and place for himself in some war office or other by manipulating Ambrose – who himself has gained a post in a division of the Ministry of Information – to edit a prospective piece of writing in a magazine, on, Basil assures him, on artistic grounds – but the way the final piece reads to an outsider, is that of an unapologetic fascist sympathizer. Which gets many involved in trouble and on the run and gets Basil a fine apartment – Ambrose’s, of course.
It’s fairly breathtaking in the audacity.
As I mentioned, through the satire and darkness, we see glimmers of humanity. It’s there. Some of us, eventually do learn:
“Yes, darling, don’t I know it? But you see one can’t expect anything to be perfect now. In the old days if there was one thing wrong it spoiled everything; from now on for all our lives, if there’s one thing right the day is made.”
I enjoyed Put Out More Flags, although I did have a hard time at the beginning keeping all the characters straight. But that’s just me and my always, too-quick initial reading of things. Some people approach food in a gluttonous way – I do so with books. Same effect – things don’t last, and I have to go back and take a more considered approach if I’m to retain anything.
Waugh was not an outsider to war, of course. He served throughout the war in varied capacities all over the map. Here’s a good overview. His Sword of Honor trilogy draws heavily on his experiences, and in reading the “true story,” it is startling to see how little Waugh exaggerated – startling because the events of Sword of Honor are as absurd and ridiculous as those in Put Out More Flags.
What is Waugh telling us as he tosses his feckless pleasure-seekers into battle against Hitler? Is he suggesting that it’s all simply a massive folly, and that ideals of goodness and justice are a sham? Not at all. Well, he might be suggesting the first – but not the second. But what is true in Waugh’s world is that most people don’t, in fact, act out of any idealistic sensibilities. They may claim to be and they may even think they are, but most of the time – they’re not. And in the process of purportedly making the world a better place – we just wreck it more.
Reading Waugh provides a potentially quite healthy corrective to the weird present moment of unrelenting, inescapable manufacturing of false narratives-as-reality. I’m going to take this in a perhaps odd direction, but as I read Put Out More Flags, this is what kept coming to mind – the present crisis of migration and refugees in Europe and the United States. I’ll focus on the American situation, because that’s what I kept thinking about.
We are told, repeatedly, that we must think about this situation in certain ways. Depending on which side you’re listening to, that “way” will differ, but what both share in common is a devotion to an idealistically-framed, black-and-white narrative. This is what the Border Situation is all about – and all presenting themselves at the border are this kind of person motivated by this need and all defending the border are this kind of person motivated by this purpose.
And if you deviate from thinking about the situation in this way – if you want to admit the possibility of venality, weakness, self-interest, exploitation and yes, stupidity – on the part of any one playing any role in this situation – you’re deemed, of course, as either inhumane or unpatriotic. A heretic, either way.
Where’s the contemporary fiction surveying the current social and political scene in which – really, this is what it is – everyone is a bad guy? Not that everyone is unrelentingly, deeply evil – but simply – every person is weak and most of us are short-sighted and tend to view our situation, not in terms of ideals – even our professed ideals – but in terms of what’s in it for us, right now.
Can you imagine a Put Out More Flags or Sword of Honor trilogy taking on the US-Mexico border crisis? In which some people, here and there, are noble, but everyone else – that is most – are just…people in a situation that everyone’s short-sightedness, ego and many people’s mendacity and stupidity is just making worse? Perhaps it exists (from either side) – if so, clue me in. I’d love to read it.
There’s a bit of this kind of take-no-prisoners political satire on television – Veep comes to mind, a show which comes to us originally, from Scotsman Armando Iannucci as an adaptation of his dark political satire The Thick of It.
British, of course.
Of course.