Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire

2. Out of Place

2 Out of Place Evelyn Waugh and the Retreating Gentleman “But,” said Paul Pennyfeather, “there is my honour. For generations the British bourgeoisie have spoken of themselves as gentlemen, and by that they have meant, among other things, a self-respecting scorn of irregular perquisites. It is the quality that distinguishes the gentleman from the artist and the aristocrat. Now, I am a gentleman. I can’t help it: it’s born in me.” Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall Paul pennyfeather, the supinely good protagonist of Decline and Fall, contends that gentlemen, the backbone of the English middle classes and the imperial nation, are defined by their commitment to honor. Pennyfeather ’s idea of honor, however, is a “scorn of irregular perquisites,” a narrative stroke that is masterful in its irony: the grand and chivalric idea of gentlemanly honor is reduced to a refusal of tips (54). We have here the quintessence of the early and most beloved Evelyn Waugh, celebrating and damning a way of life within the same brief conversational moment with little to no editorial or narrative commentary. In a move that similarly scales down the grand ethical traditions of the gentleman, William Boot in Scoop (1937), potential country squire and accidental journalist, is so unworldly that he does not recognize when the editor of Beast, in a most ungentlemanly manner, attempts to bribe him. Instead, childlike, he can only insist that his dearest wish is to “go on living at home” and continue writing his little nature column (43). Boot’s feebleness and naïveté undercut the ideal of the proud assertive independence of the gentleman. Boot and Pennyfeather ’s attitudes reveal the gap between an inherited grand tradition of the gentleman and its current diminished state. 42 Scarecrows of Chivalry Waugh, one of the more serious members of the Bright Young People, established himself as a novelist by virtue of this ability to represent with precise wit and absurdist style the rupture between gentlemanly ideals and their practice.1 Waugh’s narrative, in both instances, deflates a nationalcultural paradigm—the whole frame of tradition—through deft “structural” wit, where wit emerges from the structure of the narrative rather than being imposed from without (“Firbank” 57). Both the style and the subject of the above examples inform almost every single one of Evelyn Waugh’s works. Many of his novels (with the possible exception of the Basil Seal novels) render the story of the good but passive English gentleman as he travels through the world, but the travails of the principled yet ineffective gentleman protagonist is wittily told through the perspective of a detached, urbane English gentleman. The narrator and the protagonist, as this chapter will show, through its analysis of Scoop, are antithetical representations of the English gentleman out of joint: affected by post–World War I destabilization of hegemonic ideals of masculinity, imperial shifts (rise of nationalist anti-colonialist movements across the empire), and the impending doom of World War II. As E. M. Forster puts it, the Englishman, though admirable in many ways, is now an “incomplete person.” Indeed, his incompleteness is metonymic of the imperial nation in transition. The languages and history of the English gentleman structure Waugh’s “balanced interrelation of subject and form,” rendering his work historically apposite and specific to the mid-century.2 Indeed, Evelyn Waugh’s entire oeuvre—from Decline and Fall (1928) to the epic saga about English involvement in World War II, The Sword of Honour Trilogy (1952–61)—explores the demise of the gentleman within the context of dying traditions and changes in the empire. The broader history of the gentleman is not only the focal point of his thematic explorations of Englishness and modernity but also shapes his distinctly satirical style. In Scoop, the gentlemanly and urbane narrative voice that ostensibly casts a dispassionate eye over the world does not really see or commit to any stable world order. It produces and derives pleasure and amusement from the ironic representation of the world it observes. The narrator, in his ability to see outrageous things with equanimity and irony, spins dizzily within the urbanity and detachment that he condemns. His detachment comprises simultaneously an implicit moral center from which to judge and an amoral inhumanity that enables laughter, resulting in a “radical instability” (Waugh, Vile Bodies 183). This narrator looks upon all spaces—the modern Out of Place 43...