Like
other good writers, Terry Teachout tucks some of his best lines between dashes
or within parentheses, so they come to resemble Groucho’s asides to the audience
or W.C. Fields’ more amusing mutterings. This one is drawn from Terry’s post on Monday, an inspired convergence of his mother’s life in Missouri and Stefan
Zweig’s in Mitteleuropa and beyond. What I admire is the near-oxymoronic quality of “ebullient pessimist,”
a distinction that places equal stress on modifier and noun. The more common
species of pessimist is the crank smitten by his own gloominess. He is
spiritually lazy, usually easy on himself and unforgiving of the world, an adept
at Schadenfreude. He’s a disappointed
lover who turns rebarbative, and has learned that he can get a lot of attention
by raining on picnics.
The
writer who embodies ebullient pessimism is Evelyn Waugh in his manic phases. To
be ebullient is to be boiling and, figuratively, “gushing forth like boiling
water; bubbling over, overflowing, enthusiastic.” One can be an animated crepehanger
– rare but valued companions. The conclusions Waugh reaches about the state of
the world are grim but brightly and amusingly articulated. V.S. Pritchett
referred to “the beauty of his malice.” To call Waugh a killjoy or wet blanket
is to radically misunderstand him. Here he is in a 1951 review of Stephen
Spender’s World within World (collected
in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of
Evelyn Waugh, 1984):
“At
one stage of his life Mr Spender took to painting and, he naively tells us,
then learned the great lesson that `it is possible entirely to lack talent in
an art where one believes oneself to have creative feeling.’ It is odd that
this never occurred to him while he was writing, for to see him fumbling with
our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres
vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.”
This
works because anyone familiar with Spender’s poetry already knows it to be
leaden, clumsy and dull. And there’s the line from Scoop (1938) a newspaper editor I worked for in Indiana enjoyed quoting
at staff meetings: “News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything
wants to read.” But Waugh is more than one-liners. For sheer ebullience,
nothing beats his tour de force on what it means to be a conservative in Robbery
Under Law (1939). Here's a piece of it to be read with Syria and Nigeria in mind:
“Barbarism
is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who
seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not
come merely from habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy.
Unremitting effort
is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of
energy left over for experiment however beneficent. Once the prisons of the
mind have been opened, the orgy is on. There is no more agreeable position than
that of dissident from a stable society. Theirs are all the solid advantages of
other people’s creation and preservation, and all the fun of detecting
hypocrisies and inconsistencies.”
And
in May 1962, four years before his death, he writes (The Diaries Of Evelyn Waugh, 1976):
“Abjuring the realm. To make an interior act of renunciation and to
become a stranger in the world; to watch one’s fellow-countrymen, as one used
to watch foreigners, curious of their habits, patient of their absurdities,
indifferent to their animosities—that is the secret of happiness in this
century of the common man.”
No comments:
Post a Comment