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• Simon Winchester

  The Wit of Waugh

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  E. B. White,

  England,

  Evelyn Waugh,

  satire,

  Simon Winchester

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  Beside my bath are two books of letters, one of E. B. White, the other of Evelyn Waugh. I know I would be infinitely more ennobled, both spiritually and intellectually, to read the Sage of Maine rather than the Monster from Combe Florey, but I fear I find the latter tremendously more entertaining, especially in the suds. Two passages, both from Waugh’s letters to Nancy Mitford, seem appropriate to these straitened times, but will also hint at the fathomless depths of my taste:

  “Interesting slice of English life,” Waugh writes, in September 1951. “Ever since our marriage we have had a piano in the drawing room which no one ever plays, and a man has to come from Cheltenham to ‘tune’ it every quarter. Last time he came he said it had some internal complaint which it would cost £50 to cure. So I said, give me £50 and you can take it away, which he did. Result. Consternation. A hush over cottage and Hall, the cowman passes me with downcast eyes, the village women who come in sweep in tears. The furniture removers who carried it out treated it like a coffin. Apparently in the lower classes to sell one’s piano is the last refuge of the destitute—an irrevocable step down from decency to squalour. Did you know?”

  By the following January, Waughian squalor was in full flood: “So I have been doing sums for weeks & find I am hopelessly ruined (financially not morally). So I have come to a Great Decision to Change my Life completely. I am sacking all the servants (five does seem a lot to look after Laura & me in a house the size of a boot) and becoming Bohemian. I shall never wear a clean collar again or subscribe to the Royal Lifeboat Fund and I shall steal people’s books & sell them & cadge drinks in the Savage Club by pretending to know you. It is no good trying to live decently in modern England. I make £10,000 a year which used to be thought quite a lot. I live like a mouse in shabby-genteel circumstances, yet I am bankrupt, simply by politicians buying votes with my money.

  “The trouble is getting servants to go. There is no shortage of them now because no one can afford them. And they cannot become harlots because apparently men don’t pay women now, they just rape them & take their money. But go they shall, if I have to burn the house down.”
  

  July 13, 2009
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