The handle should return to the horizontal when the flow of water ceases. Should it fail to do so, agitate gently until it succeeds.
One feels as if the exquisite precision of the wording was designed to overcome the chaos and the rebelliousness of brute things. Waugh would have fully appreciated the famous anecdote from the life of a great Chinese calligrapher: as a ferocious tiger was terrorising a certain corner of the country, at the request of the local population, the calligrapher wrote a large inscription: TIGERS NOT WELCOME. The sheer magnificence of his calligraphy had such authority that the beast relented and left the district.
“Literature is simply the appropriate use of language”—Waugh made this striking and characteristic statement in a letter to Ann Fleming at the very end of his career. It sums up neatly his aesthetic principles, but should not be misconstrued as some sort of formalist manifesto. On the contrary, for him “the appropriate use of language both implied and guaranteed the proper functioning of a right mind.” Aesthetics is a form of ethics, as he made clear in his rebuke of John Mortimer’s views: “‘Many writers [Mortimer says] are not very good at anything except writing, and the value of their work is often not to be judged by the quality of their thoughts.’ But writing is the expression of thought. There is no abstract writing. All literature implies moral standards and criticisms.”
On a superficial level, Waugh’s views may seem contradictory: on the one hand, he multiplies statements such as “I have no psychological interest… I regard writing not as an investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed”—and, on the other hand, he emphatically rejects the possibility of a form of “abstract writing.” Stannard finely analyses the deeper coherence of his attitude: “At the root of Waugh’s pronouncements, there is something much simpler and, at the same time, infinitely more complex: the terror of Babel. One thing alone, in Waugh’s view, kept men sane: the sense of unified, agreed meaning. Ultimately this ‘meaning’ was God. In temporal terms, it was language. The post-structuralist notions of the (almost) infinite plurality of meaning would have been anathema to him: that way lay Picasso and Finnegans Wake… Waugh looked on his books as independent systems of order in a nightmare existence.” In this sense, the order of words established by the writer’s pen would keep madness at bay, as the Chinese calligrapher’s brush could chase tigers away.
Waugh would certainly have subscribed to Samuel Johnson’s moving utterance: “Of the uncertainties of our present state, the most dreadful and alarming is the uncertain continuance of reason.” The fear of incipient lunacy seems to have haunted him recurrently. On a creative level, a more benign form of his “madness” expressed itself as an ability to turn all reality into private fantasy. As a protective device against the bruising contact of life, he was determined to see events and people as a fiction from which he was separate. (In this sense, of course, there may be an element of mild schizophrenia at the source of all creative writing — after all, art is a desperate attempt to make a cruel reality a little less intolerable.) Without detracting in the least from Waugh’s well-known courage, one may even wonder to what extent his fearlessness in front of all sorts of dangers (during the war, for instance, he constantly displayed a bravery that bordered at times on downright recklessness) was not also rooted in his imaginative powers and in his capability to cut himself off from reality in order to become a detached spectator of his own predicament. The same mechanisms of imagination which produce feelings of panic, can also — if guided by a forceful will — generate courage.
In everyday life, Waugh was constantly casting acquaintances and friends into fantastic roles, and generally turning the people he met into characters in a private charade; often he would use this myth-making talent to hilarious effect. A good illustration is provided, for instance, by his visit to the great poet Paul Claudel. The majestic patriarch of Catholic letters — a genius of immense authority — had invited Waugh and Christopher Sykes to have lunch in his Paris apartment. This is how Waugh related the meeting in his diary:
The old man was deaf and dumb. All his family — wife, sons and daughters-in-law — sat round the table. He greeted me by putting into my hands a newly printed édition de luxe of some verses of his. A present? I began to thank him. He took it away and put it on a table. I had the impression it was to be my prize if I behaved well. Lively conversation mostly in English. Every now and then the old man’s lips were seen to move and there would be a cry: “Papa is speaking!” and a hush broken only by unintelligible animal noises. Some of these were addressed to me, and I thought he said: “How would you put into English potage de midi?” I replied: “Soup at luncheon.” It transpired that he was the author of a work named Partage de midi. His tortoise eyes glistened with hostility. After luncheon there was a great deal of fuss among the womenfolk as to whether or not Papa was to have cognac. He got it, brightened a little, called for an album and made me sit by him, as his arthritic fingers turned the pages… Anything that caught his fancy had been pasted [in the album]. Some were humorous, some not. There was a group of the Goebbels family. “That’s funny,” I said, feeling on safe ground. “I think it very sad,” he mumbled… When we left, he came to the drawing room door and laid his hand on the édition de luxe, gave me another look of reptilian hate, and left it on its table. Next day, he told a daughter-in-law that both Christopher [Sykes] and I were “très gentlemen.”
Christopher Sykes, however, gave a completely different account. Not only had Claudel been perfectly hospitable, genial and lively, but virtually none of the grotesque incidents mentioned in Waugh’s narrative did actually take place. In particular, Waugh’s horrible gaffe was pure fiction. One would have guessed as much: it is very difficult to believe that Waugh, who admired Claudel, would not have known even the title of one of his masterpieces: “It transpired that he was the author of a work named Partage de midi…” It transpired indeed! (One is reminded of Philip Larkin’s tranquil impudence: “Deep down, I think foreign languages irrelevant.”) Shortly after the encounter with Claudel, Sykes was astonished to hear Waugh describing for the first time this fictitious incident to a common friend; he stuck to his invention after that, as he obviously had come to believe it sincerely. Perhaps it was not simply one more instance of the novelist’s instinct at work; more exactly, “the novelist’s instinct” was itself an expression of a deeper defence against the threats which reality was directing at his self-esteem: from Sykes’ testimony, we know that, immediately before the visit, Waugh was virtually paralysed with nervousness — a most uncharacteristic and humiliating condition for a man whose powerful personality usually inspired fear in all those who approached him. (On their way to Claudel’s apartment, Waugh insisted that they first stop in a church to pray for success; and then during the entire visit, he feigned total ignorance of the French language, for fear of making mistakes and bringing ridicule upon himself.) Obviously, meeting Claudel had momentous meaning for him, and he was desperately eager to make a favourable impression on the grand old man. Yet, things did not work out the way he would have wished; as Sykes observed, “he somehow detected that Claudel, for all his geniality, did not like him.” In Waugh’s version, however, the mot de la fin was provided by Claudel commenting the next day to his daughter-in-law: “Waugh is très gentleman.” Actually this is probably a clue for the deep wound which may have triggered the entire fiction: according to Sykes, Claudel’s impression was precisely the opposite: “Later, Claudel told a friend of mine that he had been very interested to meet Evelyn Waugh, ‘Mais,’ he added, ‘il lui manque l’allure du vrai gentleman’ (‘he does not look like a real gentleman’)!”