JUSTICE?:

REVIEW: of Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh (Penelope Lively, The Atlantic Monthly)

This use of social comedy to make succinct points about morality or about a particular climate of opinion gives Waugh's writing its edge. When Waugh served up a character like Ritchie-Hook, who has the mental outlook of an aggressive schoolboy, a penchant for practical jokes, and a single-minded devotion to violence ("I'd like to hear less about denying things to the enemy and more about biffing him"), he was also pointing up the way in which the artificial community that is an army allows such exaggerated figures to break cover.

The concept of honor is not labored but subtly wound into the apposition of characters and conduct. The sword in question is the Sword of Stalingrad, made by order of King George VI as a gift to "the steel-hearted people of Stalingrad" and solemnly displayed in Westminster Abbey in 1943; but Waugh, of course, presented this public celebration of "the triumphs of 'Joe' Stalin" with cynicism. For his purposes honor resided in moral integrity and was epitomized by Guy's elderly father, a deeply committed Catholic whose quiet decency serves as a foil to the self-serving opportunism displayed by others. The scheming of two hotel proprietors, a couple seizing on the money-making possibilities offered by the wartime shortage of accommodations, is contrasted with Mr. Crouchback's self-denial and generosity: "Somehow his mind seems to work different than yours and mine," the husband remarks, oblivious to the irony.

Mr. Crouchback's conservatism is the old-fashioned ethic of noblesse oblige. Guy's brother-in-law, Arthur Box Bender, symbolizes the new Tory: he is unlikely to oblige anyone unless it serves a useful purpose or is politically expedient. The subject of politics is not addressed, per se, in the trilogy, but the political changes of the day inform Waugh's story. Waugh wrote these novels after the Labour election victory of 1945. It was perhaps because the votes of ex-servicemen were instrumental in sweeping Labour into power that he focused on the socially upending nature of the army. To Waugh's jaundiced eye, a legion of Trimmers was on the move in postwar Britain. The opening up of British society -- by way of educational opportunity, above all -- meant that a cast-iron system of privilege was now dismayingly porous. Anyone could become anything, and soon would.

The practical effects of socialism, and the horrors thereof, were a favored middle-class topic of discussion in the late 1940s. I was growing up then, and as a child of the times, Iwondered why everyone behaved as though having to wash our own dishes were equivalent to a sentence of penal servitude. But Waugh's disgruntled perception of postwar Britain went beyond outrage at domestic inconvenience. The welfare state and equality of opportunity seem to have represented for Waugh the death blow to all that he considered sacred: the certainties of hierarchy, the entrenchment of certain standards. Waugh's was a perverse vision, and to anyone of liberal tendencies -- indeed, to any democratically minded person -- distinctly off-putting, but his genius lay in making this vision beguiling.

Fifty years ago British society was polarized in a way that is hard to conceive of now: there were two nations, in terms of how people lived and of how they perceived one another. Waugh evoked that vanishing world and nailed its assumptions, its prejudices, its mysterious fault lines, with everything that his characters say and do.

Besides recognizing that the war in general was a disaster for Britain, Waugh--well before most--realized that accepting the Soviets as allies had rendered the war not worth winning:

Russia invaded Poland. Guy found no sympathy among these old soldiers for his own hot indignation.

'My dear fellow, we've quite enough on our hands as it is. We can't go to war with the whole world.'

'Then why go to war at all? If all we want is prosperity, the hardest bargain Hitler made would be preferable to victory. If we are concerned with justice the Russians are as guilty as the Germans.'

'Justice?' said the old soldiers. 'Justice?'

'Besides,' said Box-Bender when Guy spoke to him of the matter which seemed in no one's mind but his, 'the country would never stand for it. The socialists have been crying blue murder against the Nazis for five years but they are still pacifists at heart. So far as they have any feeling of patriotism it's for Russia. You'd have a general strike and the whole country in collapse if you set up to be just.'

'Then what are we fighting for?'

'Oh we had to do that, you know. The socialists always thought we were pro-Hitler. God knows why. It was quite a job keeping neutral over Spain. [...] It was quite ticklish, I assure you. If we sat tight now there'd be chaos. What we have to do now is to limit and localize the war, not extend it.'

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 2, 2004 8:24 AM