Unconditional Surrender – Evelyn Waugh, 1961 ★★★★

Reclaiming One's Soul

By any conventional benchmark, Unconditional Surrender is a depressing way to wrap a trilogy. Materialism triumphs over spirituality and humanitarianism. People we care about come to bad ends. Long-suffering protagonist Guy Crouchback suffers more. Yet the novel manages to be uplifting, at times even amusing.

What is it about Evelyn Waugh that makes misery positive company?

Unconditional Surrender, known in abridged form by the title The End Of The Battle, is the last novel not only of “The Sword Of Honour” trilogy, but of its author’s life. In it, Crouchback finds himself a soldier without assignment while World War II rages around him. He struggles with ennui and lack of purpose. All he has to keep him going is the example of his late father, whose strict Catholicism is Guy’s one solace:

The Mystical Body doesn’t strike attitudes and stand on its dignity. It accepts suffering and injustice. It is ready to forgive at the first hint of compunction.

Finding reason to go on becomes Guy’s mission. To realize this, he must endure heartbreak and loss, the stuff of life.

It can be said that Unconditional Surrender is a happy novel in that we see Guy grasp a purpose, if happy only in a conditional way. The idea of enduring life’s vale of tears was a prevailing theme of Waugh’s, never stronger than here.

Perhaps this stems from the fact Waugh himself was at such a low ebb by what was at the dawn of the 1960s the seventh and final decade of his life. He had seen Great Britain lose an empire and discover sex, with the Beatles close behind. Waugh himself suffered from alcohol and drug abuse; had a mental breakdown; and developed fractious relations with his offspring and the world at large. He had only five years left when Unconditional Surrender was published; they would be cranky years of growing public vilification and lessening cultural import.

Evelyn Waugh, late in life. By the 1950s the former chronicler of Britain's "Bright Young Things" had become a scowling, aged crank in the eyes of the media as well as some who knew him better. Image from http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03c8nnf/episodes/guide

For that reason, it’s not surprising to find a constant theme in Unconditional Surrender being of letting go. There’s a goodbye-to-all-that air in the way Guy takes stock of his situation and his setbacks, which must have mirrored how Waugh had come to see the world.

Guy reflects upon his brother officers at the outset:

To them he seemed a patriarch; to him they seemed a generation divided by an impassible barrier. Once he had made the transition, had thrown himself into the melee on the anteroom floor, had said “cheerioh” when he drank with them, and had been accepted as one of themselves. He could not do it a second time.

Given the distance Waugh’s protagonist finds with his surroundings, it’s a surprise how engaging the novel proves to be. In his penultimate novel, The Ordeal Of Gilbert Pinfold, not connected to “Sword Of Honour,” Waugh presents an annoying exercise in fictional self-absorption, playing up his autobiographical title character’s disassociation from worldly matters in a way that feels contrived and paranoid. Here you get the same disassociation, yet to a better end.

For the journey of Guy Crouchback is revealed, after much teasing in the prior “Honour” books, as innately religious. Waugh was often described as a Catholic writer, because he was Catholic and introduced Catholic subjects in his writing, but in his most famous works, e. g. The Loved One or Brideshead Revisited, God-talk felt apart from if not alien to individual aspirations. In Unconditional Surrender, it is central.

Guy thus ponders his own spiritual deadness not as an absence of divinity, but a failure of character:

“I don’t ask anything from you;” that was the deadly core of his apathy; his father had tried to tell him, was now telling him. That emptiness had been with him for years now even in his days of enthusiasm and activity in the Halberdiers. Enthusiasm and activity were not enough. God required more than that. He had commanded all men to ask.

Set against this frustrated quest of Guy’s are concerns of those around him. In the two prior novels, these were largely temporal concerns, such as duty and prestige. In Unconditional Surrender, we discover a conspiracy afoot, of subversive communists in high office who seek to enable Soviet hegemony in the post-war world.

These conspirators have another thing in common: They are homosexual, openly so for the era.

One such character is described as having “golden curls” and is called “Susie” by his brother soldiers, many as fey as he. Another, Sir Ralph Brompton, plots “the dismemberment of Christendom” with fellow seditious Brits, while regarding Guy with murderous disdain:

“There is still a certain amount of prejudice to be cleared up – not in the highest quarters of course, or among the People. But half way down,” he said, gazing at Guy through his single eye-glass, without animosity seeing him with his back to a wall, facing a firing squad.

There is a fantastical element to this pinko-gay subplot, a kind of blown-up conspiracy mongering Joe McCarthy might have balked at. Yes, there were communist conspirators at work in Great Britain during World War II, and some of them were gay, too. But one didn’t necessarily mean the other. Here, it seems it does.

This should work against Unconditional Surrender. Instead, it makes for a kind of leitmotif of futility and resignation underlining the principal message of the book, that final victory is something that can’t be measured in temporal terms. Whatever plans you have for the future won’t necessarily be shared by those you will share that future with. Thus Guy’s resignation becomes a kind of Catholic nirvana.

For Waugh, Great Britain at the dawn of the 1960s had become unrecognizable. Socialism had replaced the class system. Aristocracy was reduced to a conceit. John Bull’s place atop the world had been replaced by two unpleasant alternatives, Uncle Sam and the Russian Bear. An American, Lieutenant Padfield, is introduced into the trilogy as being “the colour of putty.” He proves as pliable, too, showing up everywhere uninvited.

Soviet hegemony is a more domineering theme of the novel, both with the gay conspiracy in London as well as the communist partisans of Yugoslavia, where Guy winds up his service in the final months of the war. It’s here the novel’s message, and its story, come home.

The communist partisans of Yugoslavia were prized by Allied forces for their willingness to fight, but scorned by Waugh who encountered them as a commando liaison officer near war's end. “Before a German armoured column they disperse,” boasts one 'Jug' in Unconditional Surrender. “That is the secret of our great and many victories.” Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Partisans

For the partisans, and their Soviet sponsors, the song remains the same; the new bandleader just has a bigger mustache. A Jewish woman, Madame Kanyi, tells Guy the score:

“It is not a place of good repute. It is where the Germans and Ustachi made a camp. They kept the Jews and gypsies and communists and royalists there, to work on the canal. Before they left they killed what were left of the prisoners – not many. Now the partisans have found new inhabitants for it.”

Guy by this time has already revealed he doesn’t particularly care about victory. It even pales as his once-prized chance at self-validation. But in Yugoslavia, he endeavors to protect Madame Kanyi and the community she speaks for: “…in a world of hate and waste, he was being offered the chance of doing a single small act to redeem the times.”

As grace notes go, it proves a small consolation with devastatingly tragic overtones. Yet it delivers a hopeful message that resonates across the trilogy, of finding one’s place within a larger whole, where asking does not mean receiving what one wants but rather what one needs.

Unconditional Surrender could be the saddest of the three books in terms of pure body count. More principal characters die in it than in the other two books put together. I count five; others introduced in the prior novels are killed off-screen and briefly mentioned.

All that said, it retains a stubborn humor, a corkscrew offshoot of the whimsy which dominated Men At Arms and runs more fitfully through Officers And Gentlemen. Guy’s ex-wife Virginia, finding herself financially adrift, remembers Guy’s staunch Catholicism and realizes she is his only hope of connubial bliss, taking up with him in a thoroughly mercenary way that proves oddly heartwarming.

“I think all you Crouchbacks are over-bred and under-sexed,” she declares.

An Anglican complements a Catholic priest on a patriotic sermon: “You could see he was an Englishman first and a Christian second; that is more than you can say of one or two of our bishops.”

A laissez-faire approach to war is put forward in several different amusing ways. “There’s nothing wrong with war except the fighting,” one British brigadier explains.

Waugh’s overarching spirit of mourning predominates, and would grow worse in 1965 when, in the months before his death, he revisited his trilogy and trimmed it down into a single-volume “recension” which manages to make Guy’s fate a bit sadder. Even in its original form, there is much of the strain of the tortured artist in Unconditional Surrender. Still, it proves by its end a poignant, satisfying way to conclude a trilogy, and as it turned out, a career.