Work Suspended – Evelyn Waugh, 1942 ★½

Not Ready for Prime Time

When I gravitate to a particular author, I can find something worthwhile in nearly anything they have written. The more obscure, the more potential to surprise or even flatter me by revealing something I can briefly fancy no one else ever noticed or appreciated.

Even a work that is boring or unpleasant to read, or obviously flawed, may reveal aspects of the author a better book will not, like stylistic quirks or habitual framing devices you don’t notice as much when a ripping yarn or brilliant descriptions soak up all your attention.

That’s what I got from reading Work Suspended, a mini-book where the main shortcoming is revealed in the title. Here two distinct aspects of Evelyn Waugh, the bright young thing and the jaded old sentimentalist, get thrust together, if clumsily.

Still, if you love Waugh, this offers some decent, low-hanging fruit.

John Plant is a mystery writer of some success who lives from novel to novel, finding momentary satisfaction with a Moroccan prostitute and otherwise staying off the grid by keeping to himself as much as possible. “This tedium was the price I must pay for my privacy, for the choice, which until lately had been a matter of special pride with me, of a trade which had nothing of myself in it,” he explains.

Life changes suddenly when a telegram arrives from his uncle in London: John’s father has died, leaving John a nice house in St. John's Wood. This gives John a bit more money, and a foretaste of his own mortality. He chooses to settle down in England where he finds himself gradually attracted to the wife of a friend.

A stately manor in St. John's Wood, London, where Plant's father lived. This posh London district would be more famous to a later generation as the site of Abbey Road Studios, where the Beatles recorded their music. Image from https://www.luxhabitat.ae/villas-for-sale/london/nw8-st-johns-wood/carlton-hill/villa-2912/.

Released first in 1941 as a short story, “My Father’s House,” then the following year in book form, Work Suspended was abandoned for at least a couple of good reasons. One was World War II, which saw Waugh volunteer for service and face combat in Crete. Another was the novel he began after returning, Brideshead Revisited, which put his career into a new gear and remains one of his most successful books.

But you can also see from existing evidence another reason Work Suspended was abandoned: It’s just not that good.

Taken separately, its two sections (“Lucy Simmonds” being the title of the other) offer little in terms of plot and don’t resolve so much as stop dead. The only thing that (tangentially) connects them is a common protagonist, the dreary John Plant, who like a later Waugh author, Gilbert Pinfold, is revealed as a burnt-out case with little to offer.

Evelyn Waugh at about the time of Work Suspended's publication, age 36. Clearly a man by then with other things on his mind. Image from http://www.evelynwaugh.org.uk/styled-98/index.html.

The introduction to “My Father’s House” teases more comic possibility than is ever realized, as he relates in the first-person his bloodless approach to mystery writing:

My poisons were painless; no character of mine ever writhed or vomited…And now and then, when the sequence of emotions I planned for my readers required a moment of revulsion and terror, I would kill an animal in atrocious circumstances – Lady Belinda’s Blenheim spaniel, for example, in The Frightened Footman.

I found two versions of Work Suspended; in one Plant is 33, in the other 34. His mystery writing is built up more in the one where Plant is 33, which I suspect was the original short story that appeared in Horizon magazine in 1941, and not what got published later in book form.

Work Suspended appears in different form in two Waugh collections. On the left, a Penguin paperback from 1982 has Plant at 34, is shorter, and includes a post-war postscript. On the right, a hardcover collection from 1998 features more about Plant's mysteries as well as other details absent from the 1982 version. Did Waugh trim or add? Given an overall sense of disengagement, I suspect the former.

In neither version of the story does Plant’s work matter; he breaks off his current novel project early in the book and ignores it thereafter. Getting Waugh to satirize the mystery genre in some way had great potential; alas it is one of many ideas he left dangling here.

The first section discusses Plant’s father in great detail. Sometimes it is poignant, sometimes amusing. Plant the elder was a painter and a conservative atheist aesthete who treated servants with proud disdain:

“I pay them abominably and they supplement their wages by cooking the books. Servants prefer it that way. It preserves their independence and self-respect.”

Plant's father is described as a painter in the steady if florid manner of James A. M. Whistler, seen above in his self-portrait "Arrangement In Gray." A man out of time, Plant explains of his father: "He never doubted the function of painting was representational." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Abbott_McNeill_Whistler.

We learn second-hand about a couple Plant’s father had working for him, the Jellabies, who seem a pair of sly operators indeed, just the type to enliven a Waugh story. Yet they vacate the premises before John arrives home, and never figure directly in the story.

Waugh does introduce Roger Simmonds in this first part, whose wife gives the second part its name. Roger is a Marxist writer who gets some of the funniest lines, like why his new play stars a locomotive:

“The usual trouble with ideological drama,” he said, “is that they’re too mechanical. I mean the characters are economic types, not individuals, and as long as they look and speak like individuals it’s bad art. D’you see what I mean?”

“I do, indeed.”

“Human beings without human interest.”

“Very true. That’s…”

“Well, I’ve cut human beings out altogether.”

The problem with “My Father’s House” is a similar lack of human interest at its core. Its characters are thin. Worse, there is no conflict, no crisis, no resolution. The second half of Work Suspended, “Lucy Simmonds,” presents more of this same issue.

A British country house. Acquiring one becomes Plant's objective in the second half of Work Suspended: "They were places where wives and children could be left for long periods, where one retired to write a book, where one could be ill, where, in the course of a love affair, one could take a girl and, by being her guide and sponsor in strange surroundings, establish a degree of proprietorship impossible on the neutral ground of London." Image from https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/british-country-house-dating-to-the-13th-century-asks-3-695-million-213592.

Here Plant finds himself attracted to Lucy, especially as she seems to distance herself from her increasingly work-distracted spouse. She’s having a baby, and this seems to attract the childless Plant, too.

She becomes his partner on various house-hunting visits, checking out country estates and agreeing none quite work for Plant. One is done up in an annoying faux-Chinese manner; in another, the builders “had gone on adding room to room like cells in a wasp-nest.”

Nothing romantic occurs, but Plant comes to treasure his time with Lucy, who seems to like him in turn. He finds enrapting her uninhibited candor about her life:

When I began to realize the spaces and treasures of which I had been made free, I was like a slum child alternately afraid to touch or impudently curious.

Once Lucy finally has her child, she leaves Plant to carry on with his life alone, which is where Work Suspended leaves him.

This first edition of Work Suspended, subtitled "Two Chapters of an Unfinished Novel" and autographed by Waugh to his friend and priest-confessor Father D'Arcy, is being offered for sale at the moment for just over $10,600. Image from www.abebooks.com.

Waugh is generally a pleasure to read; Work Suspended offers plenty of that, if not consistently. The two sides of Waugh, the withering cultural satirist of the 1930s and the more character- and setting-driven scenarist of the 1940s, exist here in tandem. He enjoys mocking Plant’s father’s old-world oddities, but finds moments of haunting empathy there, too.

While Lucy goes into a protracted and difficult labor, Plant spends his empty days visiting the zoo where he used to take Lucy, finding common cause with a caged gibbon. The disconsolate feeling is unusual for Waugh, and as he builds it up you wonder where it will go.

Then a cheeky bounder who tried to hit Plant up for money shows up to tap him again. Plant simply shrugs and gives the jerk what he wants, breaking the mood. The scene changes yet again, never to return.

One version of Work Suspended includes a brief postscript that mentions World War II as a game-changer in Plant’s life (as it was for Waugh), winding things up with a bland shrug which would land a lot heavier on a more significant Waugh effort: “Our story, like my novel, remained unfinished – a heap of neglected foolscap at the back of a drawer.”