Put Out More Flags

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Very few male novelists can draw women well; Waugh is a towering exception. His Angela personifies all the vain (in both senses) smartness of the years between the wars; the waste of her life symbolizes the waste of the old values of upper-class England; her words when Basil tells her, in proposing, that he will be a terrible husband forecast the future of that class and place: "Yes, darling, don't I know it? But you see one can't expect anything to be perfect now. In the old days if there was one thing wrong it spoiled everything; from now on for all our lives, if there's one thing right the day is made." Many years ago, I started a little handbook which I kept near me when I was reading, in which I added words that I read that I previously didn't know the definition to (or at least not well). This has lain dormant for a while, but this book caused it to be reactivated. A couple of examples: In 1924 Waugh left Oxford without taking his degree. After inglorious stints as a school teacher (he was dismissed for trying to seduce a school matron and/or inebriation), an apprentice cabinet maker and journalist, he wrote and had published his first novel, “Decline and Fall” in 1928.

With the outbreak of WWII, the opportunistic Basil states his objective early on: "I want to be one of those people one heard about in 1919: the hard-faced men who did well out of the war."space, three-dimensional war, global war, war eternal--in brief, every kind of war except the war to defeat the enemy.

I recently read, and very much enjoyed Sword of Honour, like this book, Sword of Honour is a satirical novel about World War Two.Now she had a son to offer her country…Basil—her wayward and graceless and grossly disappointing Basil, whose unaccountable taste for low company had led him into so many vexatious scrapes in the last ten years…who had stolen her emeralds and made Mrs. Lyne (Basil’s mistress) distressingly conspicuous—Basil, his peculiarities merged in the manhood of England, at last entering on his inheritance. She must ask Jo about getting him a commission in a decent regiment. can be rated on his terms. He wants a fine commission or a job as a Great Thinker, a maker of grand strategy. But his contribution to the war effort is to spy on harmless people and to suggest the seizure of Liberia, which he dramatizes Dunkerque with a raging desire to become Commandos. Believe it or not, Alastair Trumpington though he was making a great contribution merely by training to defend the British coast. But as time wears on the mere waiting commences to bore Evelyn Waugh's father Arthur was a noted editor and publisher. His only sibling Alec also became a writer of note. In fact, his book “The Loom of Youth” (1917) a novel about his old boarding school Sherborne caused Evelyn to be expelled from there and placed at Lancing College. He said of his time there, “…the whole of English education when I was brought up was to produce prose writers; it was all we were taught, really.” He went on to Hertford College, Oxford, where he read History. When asked if he took up any sports there he quipped, “I drank for Hertford.” One of Evelyn Waugh’s favourite targets for satire in his early novels was contemporary fashions in the arts. In Decline and Fall the society Margot Beste-Chetwynde (later Lady Metroland) destroys a historic Tudor building to put in its place a monstrosity of plate glass, leather walls, and modernist furniture. In Put Out More Flags Waugh aims at the literary world. Much mention is made of the two proletarian poets Parsnip and Pimpernel.