The Complete Stories Of Evelyn Waugh – Evelyn Waugh, 1998 ★★★

Novelist Keeps it Short

Being a bad guy has its uses. In fiction, Evelyn Waugh dished out cruelty in a way that kept readers both delighted and coming back for more.

No wonder he was so cynical.

The Complete Stories Of Evelyn Waugh collects everything fictional Waugh ever published short of novels. The result is a train wreck of dangerous travels, bad marriages, family insanity, and death which showcases the range of one of the last century’s literary masters.

Depth, not so much. The book proves less than the sum of its parts in more than one way, though the good is often quite good and the lesser stuff only modest letdowns. They are just short stories, after all.

Waugh was no short-fiction specialist. His art was in crafting elaborate yarns that took their own sweet time to unfurl. That said, he did produce a couple of well-anthologized stories presented here: “Bella Fleace Gave A Party” and “Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing,” both of which showcase a talent for cleverness and sharp endings.

Upper-class British couples are sent up by Waugh often in Complete Stories, as in "Love In The Slump:" "Of course he and Angela knew each other so well…but there were limits." Image from https://www.vintag.es/2018/09/couples-1920s.html

Other works here are less stand-alone: there is one alternate ending for his novel A Handful Of Dust (“By Special Request”); another which was reworked into the final ending of that same novel (“The Man Who Liked Dickens”); and a mini-prequel to Waugh’s most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited. Throw in three novellas and a novel interrupted, and you begin to see short stories weren’t Waugh’s thing.

Let us begin with the best: “On Guard” tells of a man who, embarking on a years-long mission to make his fortune, gives the inconstant object of his affections a pet dog, after instructing the pup: “See that she doesn’t marry anyone until I get back.” Obediently and hilariously, he sets out to do just that.

Waugh’s masterful descriptive powers are on at the start, describing the nose of Millicent Blade:

…it was a nose that pierced the thin surface of the English heart to its warm and pulpy core; a nose to take the thoughts of English manhood back to its schooldays, to the doughy-faced urchins on whom it had squandered its first affection, to memories of changing room and chapel and battered straw boaters.

Just how rabid Hector the pup proves in pursuit of his mission is the trick of the tale, until Millicent is left a slightly less pretty woman awaiting likely spinsterhood. Always with Waugh, smiles have fangs.

In "On Guard" Hector the pup affects various ways of keeping suitors from Millicent. He finds at the home of one "an exciting Aubusson carpet in the dining room to which Hector was able to do irreparable damage."
Photo by Alfred Cheney Johnston from https://lonewolfmag.com/canine-couture-decade-defining-dog-breeds-lens-fashion/

This approach has its limits, as when Waugh’s caustic bitterness at life seems the whole point. “Winner Take All” presents two sons, one of whom is favored by their mother to an unfailingly cruel degree. In “Too Much Tolerance,” a man shows excessive deference to his wife’s wishes, until he placidly finds himself cut out from her life.

In “Out Of Depth,” a sinister magician transports two subjects into weird alternate realities: “I chose you because you are the two most ignorant men I have ever met, he explains. “If you never come back nothing will be lost.”

Too often Waugh treated his characters as lab rats, as if that alone provides a story’s point.

What works for me are usually his beginnings. Waugh had a delightful way of launching his stories, even when he wound up crashing them later. The terrific “Bella Fleace Gave A Party” opens with this lovely take on newly independent Ireland:

The shell of the barracks stands with empty window frames and blackened interior as a monument to emancipation. Someone has written The Pope is a Traitor in tar on the green pillar box. A typical Irish town.

St. Colman's, in Cobh, Ireland, suggests what Waugh wrote of in "Bella Fleace Gave A Party," "a vast, unfinished Catholic cathedral...conceived in that irresponsible medley of architectural orders that is so dear to the hearts of transmontane pietists."
Image from commons.wikimedia.org 

Most of the short stories were originally published during a fairly short window of time, 1930-1936. There are also a few pieces Waugh produced as a boy and as a student in Oxford, none noteworthy.

The book would be much thinner if not for the inclusion of later, longer works, not quite novels though all were published as stand-alones: “Scott-King’s Modern Europe,” “Love Among The Ruins,” “Basil Seal Rides Again,” and the two chapters that make up Work Suspended, here presented as “My Father’s House” and “Lucy Simmonds.”

I covered all these in other blog posts; suffice it to say their merits neither lift Collected Stories nor knock it down. Work Suspended is obviously weakened by the fact it was left unfinished when Waugh enlisted to serve in World War II. “Scott-King’s Modern Europe” is another Waugh black comedy, somewhat amusing, if bleak and thin; while “Love Among The Ruins” is a modest social satire nominally set in an overly permissive Orwellian future. “Basil Seal Rides Again” has the distinction of being the last major Waugh story, published in 1963 just three years before the writer’s death, and shows him in refreshingly cranky good humor.

For me, the interest in the book lies in its shorter pieces. How good does Waugh the longer-distance runner manage these sprints?

As I said before, it’s a mixed bag. He’s never dull, and very stylish. His prose sings with a self-mocking, aristocratic purr that goes down smooth. In “Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing,” a noblewoman complains of her husband: “He attempted to hang himself in the orangery, in front of the Chester-Martins.”

Yet “Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing” ends on an abrupt note of black comedy that came off contrived, and wholly disconnected from the way it begins. I find it odd the story has such a high reputation.

Another piece, “Cruise,” about a pampered girl aboard an ocean liner, is better and funnier but plays like a lesser rewrite of Ring Lardner’s “I Can’t Breathe;” this time the girl writes letters rather than makes diary entries.

A cruise ship near the Suez Canal in the 1930s, a port of call in "Cruise:" "And the way she makes up to the second officer is no ones business and its clear to the meanest intelligence he hates her but its part of the rules that all the sailors have to pretend to fancy the passengers," the narrator explains.
Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/39411748@N06/7561320040

Reading these stories is diverting enough, yet too often diversion seems the sole aim.

Waugh may not have cared that much. One of his earliest stories, 1927’s “A House Of Gentlefolks,” about a young tutor and his aristocratic pupil making ready for a trip to Europe, breaks to a sudden halt on this note: “It seems to me sometimes that Nature, like a lazy author, will round off abruptly into a short story what she obviously intended to be the opening of a novel.”

That story comes early in the collection, and that line suggests a clue as to what followed. These often read not as short stories in a classic sense, but as failed novels.

The Waugh short story I most wish he had made into a novel was “Incident In Azania.” As a short story, it is not as good as “On Guard” or “Bella Fleace,” but it has a nifty set-up. Waugh creates this fictional British colony in Africa where newcomer Prunella Brooks is warned by a bevy of experienced locals:

“There have been several cases of bandits…an American missionary only last year, but he was some kind of non-Conformist…We owe it to our menfolk to take no unnecessary risks…a band of brigands commanded by a Sakuya called Joab…the Major will soon clean him up when he gets the levy into better shape…they find their boots very uncomfortable at present…meanwhile it is a very safe rule to take a man with you everywhere…”

Prunella, needless to say, disregards the advice, in a story that combines elements of O. Henry’s “Ransom Of Red Chief” and Waugh’s novel-long send-up of foreign correspondents, Scoop. Its ending is predictable, but the journey getting there satisfies.

Scenes of a British gymkhana in Cairo. Such are among the recreations indulged in by the cast of "Incident In Azania," where "they had to keep up appearances before the natives and their co-protectionists," even when they found said activity "joyless and dutiful."
Image from https://www.lookandlearn.com/history-images/U191077/The-British-in-Egypt-A-Gymkhana-at-Cairo-during-the-Season

There are few surprises in this collection; only two by my count, both positive ones. Waugh’s first published short story, 1926’s “The Balance,” showcases a middling plot and shallow characters, but a clever framing device where the central story, like most of these a romance of upper-class narcissists, unfolds as a movie being watched by two lady domestics who interject from time to time:

“Suicide, Ada.”

“Yes, but she’ll come in time to stop ‘im. See if she don’t.”

“Don’t you be too sure. This is a queer picture, this is.”

Waugh drops this approach to give “The Balance” a straightforward ending, with echoes of more serious thought perhaps relating to a failed suicide attempt the young author made around the time of its writing. Not a great piece, but I cared.

The other surprise story for me was the Brideshead Revisited prequel, “Charles Ryder’s Schooldays.” The first time I read it years ago, I was disappointed and understood why it was only posthumously published in 1982, when the novel got a second life as a splashy miniseries.

Maybe low expectations were key; this time I found reading it a much better experience, maybe the most engaging story in this collection. Ryder is presented as a stiff (“You’re a prig, Charles,” a teacher tells him) who can’t accept the idea of another student being promoted over him as dorm prefect.

Lancing College, in West Sussex, England, Waugh's own secondary school and fictionalized setting of "Charles Ryder's Schooldays:" "All the eastward slope of Spierpoint Down, where the College buildings stood, lay lost in shadow; above and behind, on the high lines of Chanctonbury and Spierpoint Ring, the first day of term was gently dying."
Image from https://www.britannia-study.com/en/schoolDetail/Lancing-College

Told from Charles’ point of view, alternately as third-person narrative and excerpts from his journal, the story gets across a coldness in Ryder by presenting otherwise sympathetic figures through a mocking lens which challenges us not to view them the same hard way Ryder does:

“I always say,” suddenly said a boy named Jorkins, “that you get the best meal in London at the Holborn Grill.”

Charles, Tamplin and Wheatley turned with cold curiosity on the interrupter, united at last in their disdain. “Do you, Jorkins? How very original of you.”

“Do you always say that, Jorkins? Don’t you sometimes get tired of always saying the same thing?”

The fact Waugh worked on this at the same time as Brideshead Revisited, with an eye toward incorporating these glimpses of youth in relation to Ryder’s later Oxford days, is fascinating; the fact Waugh worked in bits from the journal he kept at Lancing, his secondary school, more so.

According to an introduction by Michael Sissons published on March 3, 1982 (when the story debuted in the pages of The Times Literary Supplement), Waugh wrote of his “unmixed shame” in reading his old journal; reading “Schooldays,” you see why. It’s easier sometimes to forgive cruelty in an adult than in a child, especially when the kid is you.

“Charles Ryder’s Schooldays” ends on an abrupt note, perhaps because Waugh gave up on it, but that abruptness is part of the story’s quintessential spell, of opportunities to be a better person forever lost. It’s the one short story in this collection that really made me think Waugh was not wasting his time writing a short story (even if what he was doing here was writing a novel, part of Brideshead Revisited that wound up on the cutting-room floor for 37 years.)

In "An Englishman's Home," a quartet of well-to-do homeowners face the ruination of their Cotswold village to the planned arrival of an industrial laboratory. "It all comes of that parson preaching Bolshevism Sunday after Sunday," huffs a colonel.
Image from https://www.pinterest.se/pin/377880224954645088/

Waugh touches on social concerns indirectly and mostly in a joking manner save for “Compassion,” about a Scottish officer who finds himself the lone protector of Jewish refugees in Yugoslavia. The story was later incorporated into Unconditional Surrender, the last volume of Waugh’s “Sword Of Honour” trilogy, to somewhat better effect as a final test for series protagonist Guy Crouchback. Here it works, albeit in the more arid way typical of the shorter pieces here.

Every short story here has its moments of humor, liveliness, or keen sense of social expectations unmet. Waugh’s observational talents are in full form, even when his plots and characters are not.

One big drawback to this volume is the lack of any explanatory notes telling you about these stories, only a listing of publication dates crammed in just after the title page. It’s a sizeable omission, especially for the juvenilia, where spelling mistakes are about the only clue you get as to the author’s age.

But this is a fine place to get Waugh in a most concentrated form, a perfect companion for a trip to idle away an hour or two under the sun, pondering life’s arbitrary charms and cruelties (mostly the latter) from multiple vantage points in the company of a rousing, fascinating cynic.