Mind you, if one was to be honest, one would have to confess that as a genre travel writing — at book length — with a few notable exceptions, makes tedious reading. Shakespeare is all too well aware of Waugh’s shortcomings but makes the valid point that the seven travel books in this collection form a kind of covert autobiography. We receive opinions, discover attitudes and prejudices that are unadulterated by fiction: we are permitted a direct glimpse of the man. And it’s a good point to make, but Waugh, it seems to me, always adopted a mask when he wrote a travel book and the comments and reflections often appear on closer examination to be disingenuous or assumed. I’m not so sure we uncover the truth or learn much more about this difficult and hugely complex man.
I had read all these books before but thought it might be a useful exercise to reread the first and last of his travel writings—Labels (published 1930) and A Tourist in Africa (1960) — to see what differences there were between the young man, recently published and recently married, and the prematurely old, eminent writer, full of cafard and taedium vi-tae, looking at the world with a carefully cultivated jaundiced eye. Labels has always been the most interesting of Waugh’s travel books because it witnessed and was written as his first marriage collapsed. When you know the facts behind the book it appears almost as a fiction: Waugh, the narrator, looks on at himself and his wife Evelyn, thinly disguised as travelling companions, posing as a detached and disinterested observer. Little of the acute misery he was suffering as he wrote it is obviously present, except for the final paragraph, and it has, like all his travel books, an air of hoops being doggedly jumped through. The pages on Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona would challenge the most soporific guidebook.
In A Tourist in Africa Waugh, in his mid fifties, is now playing the part of the choleric, aged author. He can barely bestir himself to make any effort to engage our interest, spending pages, for example, summarizing books he has read on the voyage out to Mombasa. Occasionally you sense his spirits rise such as when, in Dar es Salaam, he comes across a man calling himself Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson, an American madman who was travelling the world crowning himself king of every country he found himself in. For a couple of pages the book turns into pure Waugh: the wholly relished black humour, the refusal to judge or comment, the clinical description of total absurdity. But such occasions are rare.
Even the fabled style slips. Labels is far more garrulous than mature Waugh, almost chatty, which is not surprising given the author’s age. A Tourist in Africa is interesting insofar as it shows the Augustan verities of his writing turning decadent: the matchless prose becoming slack and pompous: “For me a voyage is the time to read about the places for which I am bound and to study the bestsellers of the past year. I got through two books a day and never found myself without something readable.” Clichés (“breakneck speed”) and the use of the same adjective in the same line are sure signs of his lack of energy and interest, not even picked up at proof stage: “Over great areas the tsetse fly keeps man away. The great European settlement,” etc.
Waugh had little respect for his travel writing but Nicholas Shakespeare is right to claim that there are flashes of insight. Talking about Cecil Rhodes, Waugh contrasts the lives of the politician and the artist: the politician “fading into a mist of disappointment and controversy,” the artist “leaving a few objects of permanent value that were not there before him and would not have been there but for him.” This is very close to a personal credo, in fact: this was how Waugh saw himself and is both an exalted and humble definition of what a genuine artist hopes to achieve. Spontaneously addressing a school in Rhodesia he says he has been studying the wonders of the English language for over fifty years and every day still has recourse to a dictionary. There are nuggets of gold in these overworked seams but they are hard to find.
However there is one link between the first and last of these travel books that does resonate. When Waugh wrote Labels he had been cuckolded and was contemplating the impending and very public shame of his divorce. That personal hurt comes to the surface at the end of the book as his boat moves slowly up the Thames to its berth: “I woke up several times in the night to hear the horn again … It was a very dismal sound, premonitory, perhaps of coming trouble, for Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be happy for very long.” Bleak words from a twenty-six-year-old who has just seen his world collapse. But the end of A Tourist in Africa sees a similar bitter envoi as he leaves the continent: “Cruelty and injustice are endemic everywhere.” It was while Waugh was away from home writing Labels that his wife betrayed him. And I have always thought, myself, that the collapse of Waugh’s first marriage was the determining event in his life, that this cataclysm shaped him in one way or another for the rest of his days. The saddened, humiliated young man of Labels is maybe not so far removed from the posturing clubman roving round Africa. Perhaps that helps explain why there is always something joyless in Waugh’s travels.
2003
The Short Story
“Aristocrats? The same ugly bodies and physical uncleanliness, the same toothless old age and disgusting death, as with market women.” This observation comes from a notebook that Anton Chekhov kept during the last six years of his life between 1898 and 1904. In it he jotted down snatches of conversation he had overheard, anecdotes, aphorisms, interesting names and embryonic ideas for short stories. This entry about aristocrats and market women belongs to the last category. The more one has read of Chekhov the more one can envisage the short story that might have grown from this bleak comparison. The point is well made and as true today as it was in nineteenth-century Russia — death is the great leveller — but more interestingly these twenty words can lead us towards an initial way of understanding the short story as opposed to its larger sibling, the novel. I would argue that you could write a short story inspired by Chekhov’s words but they wouldn’t be sufficient for a novel.
What draws a writer to the short story? Some writers rarely tackle it, or else, in a full career, only write half a dozen stories. Others seem perfectly at home with the form and then let it drop. And then there are those for whom the novel appears the threat. Yet William Faulkner regarded the short story as harder to write than a novel. Many of the greatest short story writers have steered clear of the long form, by and large: Chekhov, J. L. Borges, Katherine Mansfield, V. S. Pritchett, Frank O’Connor. My own case is perhaps typicaclass="underline" I have written eight novels but I cannot stop writing short stories — something about the short form draws me back again and again. The aesthetic pleasures on offer are fresh and beguiling.
It’s important to remember that the short story as we know it is a comparatively recent phenomenon. The arrival of mass-market magazine publication and a new generation of literate middle-class readers in the mid to late nineteenth century saw a boom in the short story that lasted maybe a hundred years or so (things are different today). Many writers were initially drawn to the form simply as a way of making money. Particularly in America: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe all subsidized their less well-remunerated novel-writing careers by writing stories. In the 1920s Scott Fitzgerald was paid $4,000 for a story by the Saturday Evening Post (a vast sum today — multiply by ten to get some idea of a comparison). Even John Updike, in the 1950s, reckoned he could support his wife and young family by the sale of five or six stories a year to the New Yorker. Times have changed.