decline and fall (evelyn waugh)

Waugh’s first novel may be a minor piece of literature, but it still has the feel of a writer who knew how to capture the zeitgeist. Which is half the battle. The title itself is instructive. The decline and fall is not of the Roman Empire, but the British. However, Waugh is writing during the empire’s swansong, when Britain was still arguably the most powerful nation on earth and the map was still covered in pink. The world my grandparents grew up in, which would come to a terminal halt with the outbreak of the Second World War. Waugh namechecks Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. The Honourable Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s Elizabethan Manor House is rebuilt as a modernist masterpiece/ horrorshow. The protagonist, Paul Pennyfeather, is sent Virginia Woolf’s latest novel to read in prison. Waugh might be a young fogey, but he’s a fogey who knows which way the wind is blowing. The novel is a satire, but this is a gentle rather than Swiftian satire, with a commercial bent. Waugh came to my attention then other day when Peter Hitchens posted an interview with him, saying that the way he spoke English took him back to his youth. HIs lack of intellectual ambition feels like the product of high-englishness. As though to say, why in the world did this little island come to be so important? A historical fluke and a mercantile instinct, which had unforeseen and unnecessary consequences, whose demise was always imminent, even if it took a hundred years to fulfil. The United Kingdom today is not so far removed from Waugh’s world, with its archaic traditions and social divisions intact, but the full effect of the decline and fall has now kicked in, and it has become a country gradually slipping further and further into irrelevance, an archipelago of historical resonance. 

beast in the shadows (edogawa ranpo, tr. ian hughes)

Rampo is a pseudonym for the writer, Tarō Hirai. This is a novel about detective story writers, who operate under pseudonyms. Reading wikipedia, I learn that some of the novels named in Beast in the Shadows were written by ‘Ranpo’ himself. In the novel they are the work of a sadistic detective story writer who threatens a woman who jilted him. The woman then seeks the support of the narrator, another writer of detective stories, supposedly the only one who might have a brain as twisted and wily as Detective story writer #1. When the woman’s husband is murdered in bizarre circumstances, the book becomes a whodunit, with the investigation taking place across the length and breadth of Tokyo. Learning that it was written in 1928 gives what might have been a dated feeling book the sense of actually being ahead of its time, notably in its arch portrayal of the sado-masochistic anti-heroine who the narrator ends up falling for, before starting to wonder if he is being manipulated by her. Beast in the Shadows is also an interesting example of Britain’s soft cultural power, as Hirai/ Ranpo was influenced by Chesterton and Conan Doyle, turning Tokyo into a dirty, foggy Edwardian soup of a city.

nadja (andre breton, tr. richard howard)

Nadja is a curiosity. The name of Breton is like a beacon of modernism, but his novel feels strangely flat, lacking texture or surprise. It recounts in a semi-autobiographical fashion (auto-ficción) the poet’s affair with a woman who he meets by chance, with whom he is briefly infatuated, but whose increasingly erratic behaviour eventually leads her to the asylum. Breton narrates their affair in a neutral tone, eschewing any romanticism, which is all very well except for the fact that it helps to depict him in an increasingly unsympathetic light. He is attracted to Nadja, but as she fails to conform to his idea of how a partner should behave in an unlikely affair, he loses interest in her. As she heads towards some kind of psychosis, he distances himself altogether. Towards the end of the novel he writes: “Yet I never supposed she could lose or might already have lost the gift of that instinct for self-preservation which permits my friends and myself, for instance to behave ourselves when a flag goes past, confining ourselves to not saluting it; so we do not side with whatever we feel sympathetic to on every occasion, nor permit ourselves the unparalleled joy of committing some splendid sacrilege, etc….” The net effect, surprisingly, is to make Nadja appear a more intriguing personality than the poet himself. As though, in choosing to write about someone who fascinated him but ultimately bored then escaped him, he is seeking to appropriate her uniqueness whilst, through the act of writing, exercising control over their relationship in a manner he never could when they were together. There are untold subtexts here regarding the (exploitative) relationship between poets and their muses.