Study Guide to Decline and Fall and Other Works by Evelyn Waugh
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Study Guide to Decline and Fall and Other Works by Evelyn Waugh

Intelligent Education

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Study Guide to Decline and Fall and Other Works by Evelyn Waugh

Intelligent Education

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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Evelyn Waugh, one of the major satirists of the 20th century. Titles in this study guide include The Loved One, Decline and Fall, Brideshead Revisited, and A Handful of Dust.As an author of fantasy, satire, and romance, Waugh wrote in stages corresponding to world events like World War II, which divides his writing career into two distinct periods of genre. Moreover, there is notable artistic growth to be found throughout his works, highlighting his development as an author. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Waugh's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

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Year
2020
ISBN
9781645424314
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INTRODUCTION TO EVELYN WAUGH
 
EARLY LIFE, CONVERSION
Upper-class gentility and literary talent were characteristic of the family that welcomed the birth of Evelyn St. John Waugh in London on October 28, 1903. Both parents came from rural families in the social category of “gentry” - landowners, clergymen, doctors, civil servants - who associated with, but were not of, the aristocracy. Evelyn’s father, Arthur Waugh, was a professional man of letters - a biographer, poet, and critic - who from 1909 to 1929 was director of the venerable publishing firm of Chapman & Hall. Evelyn’s older brother Alec was also literary by nature, and also destined to become a famous writer.
As Evelyn Waugh declares in A Little Learning, he had a very happy childhood, assured by the love of his mother and his nurse; he came to appreciate his father only later in life. Before the young Evelyn’s formal schooling began, he was steeped in the classics of English poetry and prose, from which his father, an excellent amateur actor, read to him and Alec daily for many years. The effect of these early associations became evident in prep school and at Oxford, where Evelyn was prominent in the literary and debating societies.
After graduation, however, he was obliged to take a job as teacher in a school in Wales (a depressing experience reflected in his satire on Dr. Fagan’s school in Decline and Fall). A publisher’s rejection of Waugh’s first effort at a novel further depressed him, and he made a half-hearted attempt at suicide, amusingly recorded at the end of A Little Learning. This period of melancholy was followed, however, by the success of Decline and Fall (1928), a novel that took London by storm. His fame was increased by his next novel, Vile Bodies (1930), which satirized the “bright young things” of London society in a way that suggested the moral nihilism of the day.
It was during this period that Waugh became a Roman Catholic, a consequence of the deeply religious temperament that his brother Alec had noted in him at a tender age. After an early marriage ended in divorce, Waugh traveled for ten years throughout the world. His journeys provided him with material for several travel books as well as with background for several novels. Black Mischief (1932) brilliantly satirized native African revolution and the European materialism which it parodied; Scoop (1936) held the newspaper establishment up to ridicule. Waugh also used his travel experience to provide the South American background for A Handful of Dust (1937), which was recognized almost at once as a classic. The year it was published he married again and settled down in the West Country of his ancestors, where he lived most of the rest of his life. This period also saw publication of his Edmund Campion (1935), biography of a sixteenth-century Jesuit martyr to religious persecution, which is worthy of study as a model of English prose style, even though its historical perspective may seem biased.
WARTIME SERVICE, LATER WORKS, DEATH
When World War II broke out, Evelyn Waugh volunteered for the British Royal Marines (in a spirit later attributed to the heroes of both Brideshead Revisited and Men at Arms). On a troopship en route to the Middle East, Waugh wrote, in the style of his early satires, an “entertainment” called Put Out More Flags (1943) in which Basil Seal, rascal-hero of Black Mischief, reappears as a conniving war-profiteer. A lesser work, Put Out More Flags nevertheless ends on a note of patriotic affirmation as Basil volunteers for the armed forces.
After seeing action with the Commandos in the Middle East, and serving on a special mission to Yugoslavia, Waugh returned home to compose (in what he later referred to as a nostalgic mood) Brideshead Revisited. A departure from his earlier work in its lavish evocative style and romantic attitudes, it is also the first work in which his religious beliefs appear as the affirmation of a moral norm. The novel is purportedly a fictional representation of the process of conversion. It is generally and justly regarded by Waugh’s critics as an inferior work, but it enjoyed an enormous popular success and brought him worldwide fame.
As a result, after the war Waugh made a trip to Hollywood at the expense of a major studio; once there, he refused them permission to film Brideshead Revisited. Instead, he collected material for his next book by visiting a famous cemetery and by observing life in Los Angeles. The result of this excursion was The Loved One (1948), a brilliant satire of the more outlandish aspects of American mortuary practices. Superior to Brideshead Revisited as a literary work, it repeated the latter’s popular success, bringing Waugh an acclaim such as he would never again attain.
In the remaining twenty-odd years of his life, spent mainly among his growing family, he continued to produce works notable for their originality, variety, and quality, including: Helena (1950), a fictional and openly “apologetic” version of the life of St. Helen, mother of Constantine and founder of the True Cross; The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), a fascinating and at times hilarious fictional account of Waugh’s own nervous breakdown; and his final major work, the trilogy of World War II - Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961), published together as Sword of Honour (1965) - in which the hero, Guy Crouchback, embodies traditional values. In addition, Waugh wrote the authorized biography of Monsignor Ronald Knox, translator of the Bible and a lifelong friend, whose prose style Waugh modestly considered superior to his own. Finally, Waugh completed A Little Learning (1964), the first volume of his projected autobiography. He died suddenly after a brief illness in April 1966, already recognized as one of the greatest stylists in English literature.
NOVELIST AND SATIRIST
Periods of Development
Evelyn Waugh’s career as one of the major satirists of the twentieth century falls into two main periods, with World War II as the line of demarcation. The first period corresponds to the years between the two great wars, the Great Armistice of 1919-1939. It includes (considering only the fiction) Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, and Scoop, all of which might be characterized as satiric fantasies; and A Handful of Dust, possibly the finest example of sustained irony in the English language. This period can be justly described as one of steady development of control over his material and perfection of style. The second, postwar period of 1945-1965, begins with Brideshead Revisited, a departure from previous works in both style and purpose, and rightly described as a realistic romance. The second period, however, also includes the most brilliant of Waugh’s satiric fantasies, The Loved One, as well as some minor examples of the same genre; among these, Scott King’s Modern Europe and Love Among The Ruins, both socio-political in nature. Completed also in this period were a highly original historical novel of the legendary St. Helen; and the major trilogy on World War II, Sword of Honour. This last is a generally underrated work which, with at least partial success, combines his earlier satiric manner with realistic treatment of social and religious problems. Waugh’s second period, therefore, may be characterized as one of continuous expansion of range in the variety of literary forms and styles, a development that is nevertheless still based essentially on his satiric purpose and method.
Satire and The Satiric Norm
To understand Waugh’s artistic development, we must have some appreciation of the basic concept of satire. That satire makes fun of something or someone is widely recognized, but what this implies is not so readily understood. First of all, the colloquial “makes fun of” carries the sense of mockery or ridicule; but to ridicule someone, to make him appear ridiculous, is to indicate some kind of disapproval, which in turn suggests that a judgment has been made. But a judgment requires some kind of standard or norm, against which a person’s action is measured, and a deviation from this norm is the cause of disapproval and condemnation. Thus, the satirist is essentially a moralist; that is, he is concerned with people’s mores, or people’s behavior and the codes that regulate it. However, the satirist’s norm is not necessarily a moral code in the sense of the Golden Rule or the Ten Commandments, though it might well be based on one. His norm is rather the social expression of some such moral system as it affects people’s relationships with one another; for example, the relationship of two people involved in a divorce suit, the conduct of which is determined by the divorce laws. These laws, and the whole situation, have reference to a concept of marriage, but this concept is not necessarily the norm of the satirist; he might ridicule those involved in the divorce because, for example, by the standard of the divorce laws, the contestants are dishonest. Such is the case in A Handful of Dust. Or the norm might be one associated with a particular social group or class, as, for example, the ideal of the “gentleman” associated with the “gentry” or upper-class - an ideal of courtly behavior that historically originates in the specifically religious vows of chivalry. This ideal of the gentleman is present in most of Waugh’s writings. It can be seen, then, that satire (as distinct from mere farce, which of course can serve a satiric intention) has two essential characteristics: (1) It is social - that is, it has to do with the relationships of people in their social existence, and (2) it is moral - that is, it makes fun of people’s actions with reference to a norm and thereby judges and, usually, either implicitly or explicitly, condemns them.
To understand completely the satirist’s intention it is therefore necessary to recognize the norm or standard of judgment by which he represents something as “ridiculous.” And quite often this norm will be embodied by the satirist in some representative who affirms the positive values that the “ridiculous” characters deny. Sometimes, however, the norm is implicit (not directly stated) and difficult to identify unless we have some idea of the specifically literary traditions and forms, as distinct from moral codes, that the satirist employs for his purpose. Here is where the study of literary history enables us to understand the significance of what otherwise might appear insignificant or even irrelevant. An example from classical literature may perhaps help to clarify this point. One of the most ancient literary traditions, originating in early Greek poetry and persisting, through poetry, drama, and prose fiction, in various forms to the present day is the pastoral. The term itself (Latin pastor: shepherd) suggests an association with nature. Early Greek lyric poets like Bion and Theocritus, who celebrated the idyllic existence - the ideal of man’s harmony with nature - used the shepherd as representative of this ideal. Thus the pastoral idyll celebrated life in harmony with one’s natural surroundings, which presumably were conducive to virtue (or at least the “virtues” of simplicity, frugality, and the like). Later poets like Virgil, however, held up this ideal as a contrast to the corruption of society as distinct from nature (a corruption associated with life in the city) and, through contrast, implicitly satirized such corruption. This satiric use of the pastoral tradition was imitated by writers of the Renaissance and was thereby incorporated into English literature, where it continued into modern prose fiction, beginning with Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. And so in American literature, Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn employs the pastoral tradition when he contrasts the idyllic freedom of Huck and Jim’s life on the raft with the corrupt slaveholding society on the shore. So also in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald associated the American West, the Frontier, with pastoral virtue and the East with social corruption.
Having seen how a specific literary tradition can be variously employed for satiric purposes, we come to the question of how we can apply our general observations to the works of Evelyn Waugh. From the foregoing, it is clear that we must attempt first to identify the norm - or at least determine if there is one. As has been indicated, the norm may be either explicitly embodied in some figure (or even some institution or ideal) in the narrative; or it may be implicitly contained in, for example, some contrast of opposites - loyalty by disloyalty, traditional values by their denial, and so forth. In Waugh’s case, the problem is complicated by the fact that his output comprises such a variety of literary genres or forms - sometimes in one work - that it is difficult to distinguish the significant from the incidental. The problem is further complicated by the fact that in some instances the norm is present only intermittently, if at all; in others it is implicit, and in at least one case there is an explicit norm but practically no satire! There is, however, in his work an overall development from lack of any clearly discernible norm in the earliest satires to either an implicit or explicit norm in his later works. This can be illustrated by examining the four major works analyzed in this text as examples of phases of this development.
After our detailed study of these four novels, we shall be in a better position to discuss Waugh’s growth as an artist.
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DECLINE AND FALL
PRELUDE
JUXTAPOSITION - CIVILIZATION AND BARBARISM
The opening of the novel - a forecast of some of the most hilarious satiric writing in twentieth-century literature - is an excellent illustration of Waugh’s basic comic method as well as the problems it raises. The method itself is simply a version of the age-old structural principle of juxtaposition, or the contrast of two unlike things by placing them side by side, thus effecting the incongruity which is the essence of all comedy. That is, the recognition of the incongruous is the recognition of the difference betw...

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