Basil Seal Rides Again – Evelyn Waugh, 1963 ★★★

Last Laugh

Evelyn Waugh’s final published fiction is utterly free of ambition, a recycling of familiar characters in service of amusing dialogue and a diverting if meandering plot.

Even the way in which it was originally published, as an ornately bound, personally-signed limited edition, suggests more a celebrity cash grab than anything creative. As a final word from Waugh the author, it isn’t much of a signpost, yet taking time to read it hardly damages the fellow’s legacy, either.

The novella reintroduces us in late middle age to the protagonist of two earlier novels, Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags. In those books, Basil Seal was a scoundrel who left much damage in his wake. Our title character here is a quieter, podgier fellow ensconced in a lucrative marriage who simply wants to enjoy what he’s got for as long as he can:

He had once expressed the wish to become one of the “hard-faced men who had done well out of the war.” Basil’s face, once very hard, softened and rounded. His scar became almost invisible in rosy suffusion. None of his few clothes, he found, now buttoned comfortably…

The story, which arrives only in fits and starts as the focus of both Basil and Waugh do wander, involves a suitor for Basil’s daughter, Babs, whom Basil would very much like to repel. Suffice it to say there is more than a hint of familiar rascality in Charles Albright. But the younger generation has a mind of their own, and silly Babs is too besotted to care about Daddy’s qualms.

An original illustration by Kathleen Hale was featured in the 1963 limited edition. It depicts Charles Albright making off with a bottle while Basil Seal sits in a gondola with his wife and daughter. Image from https://www.anthonyburgess.org/blog-posts/basil-seal-rides-again-or-the-rakes-regress/.

Despite the subtitle “A Rake’s Regress,” the Basil Seal we encounter in Rides Again is hard to square with the fellow of earlier novels. Almost too complacent, he seems more of a piece with the Waugh alter ego featured in Waugh’s last stand-alone novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. While not a writer like Pinfold (or Waugh), Seal here is a man of habits and pleasures who seeks only to retain the status quo for as long as he can, surprisingly easy to like whether dealing with a radical health regimen or the predations of Charles Albright, who much more than Seal wears the mantle of villainy here.

It may well be Albright who is the “Rake” referred to in the subtitle.

Seal asks him: “May I ask, then, how you propose to support my daughter?”

“Oh that doesn’t come into it. It’s the other way round. I’m doing what you did, marrying money. Now I know what’s in your mind. ‘Buy him off,’ you think. I assure you that won’t work. Barbara is infatuated with me and, if it’s not egotistical to mention it, I am with her. I’m sure you won’t want one of those ‘Gretna Green Romances’ and press photographers following you about.”

The dawn of the 1960s and its cultural revolution registers here, if in a slight way. Seal’s daughter Babs refers to a “happening” where a female performance artist allows spectators to cut her dress off with a pair of scissors and paint her green. Even before Seal discovers his designs on Babs, Albright offends him with his beatnik beard.

Waugh's signature as it appeared on one of the limited-edition volumes sold of Basil Seal Rides Again. This particular copy found its way into the private collection of British author Anthony Burgess. Image from https://www.anthonyburgess.org/blog-posts/basil-seal-rides-again-or-the-rakes-regress/. 

But the overall focus here is not on the present nor the future, but the past. Our story opens with Basil in familiar company, at a stodgy function where the guests are characters from past Waugh stories. Ambrose Silk is the guest of honor, while expatriate poets Parsnip and Pimpernell lend their suspect majesty to the proceedings.

Later we meet Margot Metroland, who made her debut in Waugh’s first novel, Decline And Fall, and forty years on spends her time in a darkened room watching television and brooking no interruptions.

“She’s always looking at that thing nowadays,” Basil is told. “It’s a great pleasure to her.”

The whole opening section is basically set up to puncture the pomposity of the Silk gathering, as Seal and his friend Peter Pastmaster (another callback character) sit through the affair with loud impatience that gets on everyone’s nerves. Seal and Pastmaster remain oblivious to the disruption they cause.

They are, Waugh writes, “two stout, rubicund, richly dressed old buffers” who “had scorned to order...life with a view toward longevity or spurious youth.”

Evelyn Waugh at his study in 1963, the year Basil Seal Rides Again was published. Photo by Mark Gerson from https://www.allposters.com/-sp/Evelyn-Waugh-in-His-Study-at-Combe-Florey-1963-Posters_i10149784_.htm.

They badger each other about their physical ruin:

“I’ve been called ‘florid.’”

“You’re fat and red.”

“So are you.”

“Yes, why not? Almost everyone is.”

“Except Ambrose.”

“Well, he’s a pansy. I expect he takes trouble.”

“We don’t.”

“Why the hell should we?”

“We don’t.”

“Exactly.”

This is all fairly good fun for a while, as long as you don’t mind the lack of forward momentum. After a while, Basil decides he does want to do something about his appearance and enrolls at a health farm.

Waugh plays up the absurdity of the situation: “It may one day occur to a pioneer of therapeutics that most of those who are willing to pay fifty pounds a week to be deprived of food and wine, seek only suffering and that they could be cheaply accommodated in rat-ridden dungeons.”

Waugh's final story was also published in a February 1963 issue of the Sunday Telegraph, complete with illustrations. Image from https://review.gale.com/2017/11/22/waugh-in-print/.

Some hint of incestual feeling is suggested between Basil and his daughter, as the girl nibbles on papa’s ear and puts her face against his thigh. But it seems more in line with the sort of manipulation that she, being the daughter of a Seal, would know rather well.

“I happen to be in love. You must know what that means. You must have been in love once – with mummy or someone.”

“Rot. And dammit, Babs, don’t blub. If you think you’re old enough to be in love, you’re old enough not to blub.”

The absence of a deep plot isn’t so bad when Waugh entertains with his satiric barbs at prevailing social mores one last time. There is even a clever resolution of the Albright situation once Seal and Waugh get around to addressing it.

To call Basil Seal Rides Again minor Waugh is not meant at all as criticism but rather appreciation for the modest goals the author set for himself, revisiting a well-regarded character and putting him through his paces one more time. It works fine at what it sets out to do. More jaunt than ride, but pleasant still.