Scott-King's Modern Europe – Evelyn Waugh, 1947 ★★

Not Taking the Scenic Route

Brevity is the soul of wit, but the same can’t be said of satire. One needs to toy with the target like a spider with her prey. So what to say about a satire when its approach is as over-and-out as this?

Evelyn Waugh was in the habit of producing short novels during the second half of his career, beginning with Work Suspended (1942) and concluding with Basil Seal Rides Again (1962). All have charm; none play out as thin and desultory as this.

Scott-King is a teacher at a British secondary school who one day finds himself the recipient of an invitation to celebrate the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of an obscure poet from an obscure part of Europe called Neutralia. True to its name, Neutralia avoided the Second World War and lives under a dictatorial Marshal who apparently runs his nation with a blend of fascism and socialism.

Scott-King sees a free holiday and a chance to commune with his muse. He’s a deliberately indifferent protagonist:

“Dim” is the epithet for Scott-King and it was a fellow-feeling, a blood-brotherhood in dimness, which first drew him to study the works of the poet Bellorius.

Evelyn Waugh in 1947, the year Scott-King's Modern Europe was published. It came out between two famous Waugh novels, Brideshead Revisited (1945) and The Loved One (1948). Image from https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2020/04/17/what-evelyn-waugh-saw-america-anglo-american-romance.

Waugh was by the mid-1940s a recognized master of political satire as well as travel writing, having penned multiple successes in both genres. Bringing them together has promise. Scott-King’s Modern Europe does amuse; sometimes even engages. But it lacks real investment. Maybe as a younger man Waugh could get away with cleverness alone; here I felt him going through the paces, his caustic tone drained of its usual playfulness but lacking the compassion that lifted his later work.

The novella begins promisingly with a brief glimpse of Scott-King in his element, a master of classics at Granchester, an “entirely respectable” if not first-rate school: “He was of a type, unknown in the New World but quite common in Europe, which is fascinated by obscurity and failure.”

Bellorius, we are told, lived in Neutralia back when it was part of the Hapsburg Empire. He composed but a single volume of utopian-themed poetry which was soon forgotten. Scott-King wrote a long scholarly article about Bellorius, enough for a pocket watch that soon broke, and years later, an invite to this Bellorius celebration at Neutralia’s capital, Bellacita.

Neutralia is a terminus for all the bad and little of the good human progress has had to offer since the end of the Renaissance. “Make the list full, slip in as many personal foibles as you will, you will find all these in the last three centuries of Neutralian history,” Waugh explains.

A guided tour of Bellacita lays this point out well:

The underling leaned towards them from the front seat and pointed out places of interest. “Here,” he said, “the anarchists shot General Cardenas. Here syndic-radicals shot the auxiliary bishop. Here the Agrarian League buried alive ten Teaching Brothers. Here the bimetallists committed unspeakable atrocities on the wife of Senator Mendoza.”

Even after World War II, Europe was a powder keg still given to explosions. Above is a scene from Athens, Greece, during a civil war between western-backed and Communist forces that lasted from 1946-49. Like they did here, rebels in Neutralia fight with both bullets and graffiti. Image from https://www.vintag.es/2014/05/black-white-pictures-of-greek-civil-war.html.

There is a lot of comic potential in multiple directions. You have a milquetoast protagonist, a darkly comic Ruritanian setting, and ample tourist-themed misery to plumb. There is also in Bellorius a legacy of poetic mediocrity to exhume and goof on, which given Waugh’s greatness as a prose stylist, should have been a riot.

But in the end, the only really positive thing I can say for Scott-King’s Modern Europe also makes it disappointing: It’s a lightning-fast read.

As a visitor in Neutralia, Scott-King must put up with a lot. He is imprisoned in a miserable VIP lounge (“I wonder, thought Scott-King, how they treat quite ordinary, unimportant people”), goes an entire day in Bellacita before anyone thinks of feeding him, and is forced to endure long political speeches. Gradually it dawns on him he is being used as a human prop. Not that he minds; he only worries how he will get home once his handlers abruptly pull the plug.

Waugh derives a lot of humor from basic things like language barriers, which feels a bit cheap. “My mother had a propriety but it is lost,” one unhappy fellow tells him, meaning “property” but, well, you get the point.

Everyone works very hard in Neutralia, we are told:

“In Neutralia for a scholar of the first class the salary is 500 ducats a month. The rent of his apartment is perhaps 450 ducats. His taxes are 100. Oil is 30 ducats a litre. Meat is 45 ducats a kilo. So you see, we work.”

Unveiling statues is the focus of Scott-King's travels in Neutralia. "The statue was appalling...It was scarcely human." Above, unveiling a statue of Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov. Photo by Alexander Vershinin from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/world/asia/in-turkmenistan-and-uzbekistan-the-legacy-of-soviet-rule-endures.html.

Upper-class males spend their evenings in a fancy hotel where everything is too expensive to afford but the custom of leisure is locked in place. “In spite of numberless revolutions and the gross dissemination of free thought, Neutralian ladies still modestly kept the house,” Waugh adds.

What passes for entertainment happens when an unusually tall woman wearing shorts shows up with Scott-King’s party. A bit of a mistake, actually, she’s part of a gymnastics convention, but Waugh plays up the sexual incongruity of her appearance for all he can.

It’s one of several times you feel him not making the most of his ideas. Stuff happens in the story; at one point Scott-King and an academic companion named Whitemaid pass up making their required speeches at a state dinner after consuming too much alcohol. Scott-King realizes the following morning that a “gross, black, inexpungible blot” had fallen upon him and that his fellow academics are gravely disappointed. But nothing more comes of this. Whitemaid vanishes with the gymnast and the tour continues without either showing up again.

It is not clear where exactly Neutralia is supposed to be set. The fact it lies somewhere off the Mediterranean, was neutral during World War II, and has a strongman in charge suggests Spain; so do the Latin names of many of its inhabitants. But the strongman is called “Marshal” and his country formerly part of the Hapsburg Empire, so perhaps old Yugoslavia, over on the other side of the Mediterranean. Waugh’s unhappy experiences as a commando in Yugoslavia would show up in his later fiction; why not here, too?

George Orwell reviewed Scott-King's Modern Europe in 1948, finding it blinkered and conservative. "This is an extremely readable book, but it lacks the touch of affection that political satire ought to have," he wrote. Image from https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/06/george-orwell-birthday-politics-socialism. 

In the 1947 Chapman & Hall first edition, and some later editions, a brief footnote explains “the Republic of Neutralia is imaginary and composite and represents no existing state.” So never mind then.

After Scott-King’s brief embarrassment at the state dinner, the story centers on how the academic tour falls apart. No one in Neutralia cares much about Bellorius either; Scott-King finds himself the lone confidant of the man handling this visit for the government, who complains about being undercut by his adversaries within the government. Scott-King isn’t one to notice these things, or even care when they are pointed out.

Waugh gets off a good line or two about Marxist rule: “Nowadays it is not what you do that counts, but who informs against you,” Scott-King is told. The brutalist school of architecture Waugh mocked in other, better books is sent up here as well, in the form of a national monument, “a loveless, unadorned object saved from insignificance only by its bulk; a great truncated pyramid of stone.”

Mostly though, this feels like an aborted novel, seeded with some worthy ideas but rushed to its conclusion while the author chased better game. Not terrible; but like old Bellorius, not cheated by its obscurity.