Labels: A Mediterranean Journal – Evelyn Waugh, 1930 ★★★

Voyage of a Misspent Wife

While still a young man, Evelyn Waugh struck upon his method for success: it pays not only to be witty when writing, but shocking, too.

That Waugh was, not right away, but early out of the gate. Part of a celebrated circle of upper-class wastrels known as “the Bright Young Things,” he was recognized while still a student for his talent and rapier wit. After launching himself with a ruthless satire about British society, Decline And Fall, that offended many and made his name, he was left with the problem of what to do next.

His answer: Mock the rest of Europe by way of a travel book.

Thus came Labels, the first in a series of Waugh accounts of voyages around the world that mix fact and fiction and aim to be both pungent and funny. You do get all that here, for better mostly, though not always. It wouldn’t be Waugh otherwise.

Waugh is very open about his materialist agenda at the start, that he sees it as a way to keep his newly-made brand name in the public eye:

Now, even if you are very industrious, you cannot rely on writing more than two books a year, which will employ your public, as it is called, for about six hours each. That is to say, that for every hour in which you employ your reader’s attention, you are giving her a month to forget you.

Waugh travelled on the MS Stella Polaris, seen here two years before its 1929 voyage with Waugh. While praising the ship's accommodations and crew, Waugh was often vexed by his fellow passengers.
Image from https://www.cruiselinehistory.com/ms-stella-polaris/

Waugh explains the title as meaning an examination of how certain places get labelled, rightly or wrongly. Waugh doesn’t stay with the idea long, though the concept of labeling remains. Waugh encapsulates places he sees in ways that are sometimes appreciative but often not:

The thing which chiefly distinguishes the nightlife of Paris from that of London is that it can be indefinitely prolonged and almost indefinitely varied. But even in its wide variety, there breaks in on one’s appreciation the still small voice of the débutante, whispering “bogus.”

On Italians: You should always belittle their goods and they will respect you. The slightest courtesy renders you contemptible.

On accommodations: All the hotels in Egypt are bad, but they excuse themselves upon two contrary principles. Some maintain, legitimately, that it does not matter how bad they are if they are cheap enough; the others, that it does not really matter how bad they are if they are expensive enough.

The Montenegrin town of Kotor, then known as Cattaro, was one stop that left Waugh unimpressed. "I do not think it is a town where anyone except the most hardened water-colourist would want to stay for long," he writes.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotor   

Waugh forewent hotels for much of his expedition, travelling by cruise ship across the Mediterranean. “As far as I can see, a really up-to-date ship has every advantage over an hotel except stability and fresh meat,” he explains. The cruise was actually a belated honeymoon for himself and his new wife, also named Evelyn, who fell ill during the cruise and remarried the same year Labels was published.

For this reason, Waugh obscures the fact this was not a solo trip. Instead he constructs a young couple, Geoffrey and Juliet, who end up his traveling companions aboard the Stella Polaris. Most of the time Geoffrey and Evelyn occupy themselves visiting various places while Juliet languishes under a myriad of illnesses.

Sometimes Waugh forgets to include Geoffrey in brief, occasional visits to Juliet’s bedside; his casual manner about her predicament suggests a reason why he-Evelyn and she-Evelyn, as they were dubbed, were not long for the world.

Evelyn Waugh with his new wife, Evelyn Waugh née Gardner, just after their wedding and before their fateful cruise. The couple were newlyweds while material for Labels was being gathered, but long separated by the time it was published.
Image from https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/144697468/evelyn-florence_margaret_winifred-nightingale

Labels captures Waugh at an unexpected crossroads in life. Not only had he just lost his wife, but he had found God, becoming a Catholic. It is not clear whether this took hold of him during the trip or well after it, but the question of Catholicism comes up often, like the way an Irish monk defied the expectations of his fellow travelers:

They had expected someone very superstitious and credulous and medieval, whom they would be able to regard with discreet ridicule. As it was, the laugh was all on the side of the church. It was we who had driven twenty-four miles, and had popped our tribute into the offertory box, and were being gently humored for our superstition.

Waugh’s attention is often on those he finds himself with. Like Mark Twain’s early travelogue, Innocents Abroad, the satiric lens extends both outwards at places visited and inwards at fellow visitors. Like Twain also, Waugh is a master of snappy one-liners. When he goes long on a particular location or topic, it’s not always to his credit.

While in Malta, Waugh stayed at the Great Britain Hotel, dining room seen above. Waugh frankly describes his choice of hotel as based on where he could use his influence as a travel writer to get free accommodation.
Image from https://timesofmalta.com/article/pre-war-postcards-and-the-maltese-restaurants-they-advertised.850781

He really doesn’t get Arabs or their art, describing the latter as tedious geometric patterns. “…there is no single aspect of Mohammedan art, history, scholarship, or social, religious, or political organisation, to which we, as Christians, cannot look with unshaken pride of race.” The Turks, with their newfound embrace of secularism and women’s suffrage, annoy him even more.

But a surly Waugh can also be Waugh at his most enjoyable:

I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset; the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel grey, glowing on the top and then repeating its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of grey smoke, with the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a grey pastel sky. Nothing I have ever seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting.

In other places, he mocks Neapolitans hawking dirty postcards and sneers at the young mothers hogging deck chairs, “doing frightful things to their babies with jars of Vaseline.” In Port Said, Egypt, he meets several members of an expatriate colony, one of whom explains: “You have to come outside England to meet the best type of Englishman.”

Waugh's journey through the Mediterranean, as it is charted in a first edition illustration of Labels. Begun in February 1929, the voyage ended that June. By September, he and his wife were divorced. The book, with no mention of she-Evelyn, followed a year later.
Image from https://shapero.com/en-us/products/evelyn-waugh-labels-signed-first-edition-106012 

Waugh’s perspective on the cultures he encounters may be skewed by his characteristic chauvinism and waggish ennui, but his descriptive powers are at their early peak and well employed throughout. There is a vivid word portrait on nearly every page, whether it is a Maltese slum or a mosque in Istanbul.

Just as delightfully picturesque is his way of capturing scenes of docking and disembarking, like this account of Egyptian porters:

These throw themselves upon one’s baggage like Westminster schoolboys on their Shrove Tuesday pancake, with this difference, that their aim is to carry away as small a piece as possible; the best fighter struggles out happily with a bundle of newspapers, a rug, an air-cushion, or a small attaché case; the less fortunate share the trunks and suitcases.

I could have done with less architectural description, as he seems at times eager to parrot the guidebooks he was carrying with him. Accounts of groined ceilings and corbelled parapets have a canned quality about them, more so because he’s trying to be instructive, not snarky. He wants to land his shots, but at the same time, be illuminating and show something of an educated perspective.

Late in his journey, Waugh visits Lisbon, which he calls "a very agreeable surprise." Above, the ceiling of the church of Sao Roque, where he spent much time. The above image is by Duncan McLaren, whose blog on Waugh is a must-read. For more on his boots-down perspective on Labels, see https://www.evelynwaugh.org.uk/styled-36/index.html

The organization of the book is its chief fault, though it may be because he was sticking to his notes. When not recounting the adventures of Geoffrey and Juliet, he seems to hew to the facts, but the course of his journey was rather odd, with what seems a few nights in Paris and a month in Port Said. This makes for a lopsided read.

While Waugh’s religious observations strike a familiar chord, he has some positive takes on what he saw off the beaten path. For all the time he spends in Port Said (occasioned by she-Evelyn’s serious illness, transferred here to Juliet), he makes the most of his time there, taking stock of the red-light district and the street urchins.

A postcard view of Port Said, during Waugh's lengthy stay there. The British delegation he met in Port Said impressed him with their lack of status consciousness: "No one is troubled by social aspirations because there is no direction in which to aspire."
Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/473792823291855165/

It is in Port Said that Waugh comes closest to the expressed intent of Labels, debunking English preconceptions of African life:

There was, of course, no nonsense of tropical romance; no indomitable jungle, no contact with raw nature, no malaria, delirium tremens, or “mammy-palaver;” no one showed the smallest inclination to “go native;” no one was eating out his heart for the lights of Piccadilly or yew walks of a manorial garden; they did not play their bridge with greasy cards or read and re-read a year-old newspaper; no one was “trying to forget.” One must go to other parts of Africa for that. Port Said is highly respectable and almost up to date.

In Barcelona, he gets an eyeful of the architecture of Antoni Gaudí and is thoroughly impressed by the humor and charm, casements that seem to drip like ice cream and steeples that slope almost sideways.

Waugh famously detested modern artists and their work, but was impressed by Gaudi's architecture on display in Barcelona. "What in them is frivolous, superficial, and chic is in him structural and essential," Waugh explains. Above, a view from landmark Casa Batlló.
Image from https://www.easyhotel.com/travel-guides/europe/must-see-gaudi-buildings-barcelona 

Gaudi’s Templo de la Sagrada Familia, famously uncompleted then and still so today, sparks special admiration with its stark spirituality:

I do not say that if I were rich I could not find a better way of devoting my fortune, but I do think that it would be a pity to allow this astonishing curiosity to decay. I feel it would be a graceful action on the part of someone who was a little wrong in the head to pay for its completion.

Waugh always had the needle ready, even when doling out praise. And he does ramble about sundry topics well outside his travels. But his takes on what he saw sing with authenticity and variety, as well as engaging humor. “Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist,” he explains.

Seeing Europe in the last days of the 1920s is a transporting experience however confined a reader is by space and time; seeing Europe in the company of such a unique and singular character makes the experience more pleasant. And unlike poor She-Evelyn, you can close the book for other diversions whenever the narrator gets on your nerves.