Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene and Ivy Compton-Burnett

( 2 3 ) B e t w e e n t h e W a r s F i c t i o n I

(Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene and Ivy Compton-Burnett)

T h e T w e n t i e t h C e n t u r y

[See Topic 13]

T h e 2 0 th C e n t u r y F i c t i o n

[See Topic 15]

E v e l y n W a u g h ( 1 9 0 3 - 6 6 )

Ø  E a r l y P e r i o d :

-  satire and comedy: jests at human folly, injustice, crime and even potential horror

-  conc.: society in decay, human depravity, menace

Decline and Fall (1928):

-  conc.: the disastrous career of the protagonist that terminates in prison

-  the protagonist: a failed undergraduate, a failing schoolmaster and exploited lover

Vile Bodies (1930):

-  conc.: devaluation of received standards

A Handful of Dust (1934)

-  < indebted to T. S. Eliot's Waste Land (the title comes from the poem)

-  > each of its settings re-presents aspects of The Waste Land: a seedy Arthurian-Victorian country house > London clubs and apartments > a Brighton hotel > uncharted equatorial forests of South Am.

-  conc.: collapse of the illusions of rural feudalism x surface values and cynicism of metropolitan life

-  subject: both a literal divorce and a divorce btw old and new values

Ø  E t h i o p i a E x p e r i e n c e :

-  < visited Ethiopia several times

Remote People (1931):

-  = a travel book

Black Mischief (1932):

-  = fiction inspired by his Ethiopia visit

-  conc.: a tottering Af. kingdom

Waugh in Abyssinia (1936):

-  = an account of his journalist experience

Scoop (1938):

-  = a fictional enlargement of the former

-  also a pointed satire on pop. nwsp industry

Ø  L a t e r P e r i o d :

-  converted to Rom. Cath. > an amateur apologist for its teaching

Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945):

-  < reworks and reconsiders the themes of A Handful of Dust against the WW II background

-  the protagonist's retrospect shows the decline of an aristocratic family x the extension of his memories into the present allows for the momentary triumph of the ancient over the modern

-  the protagonist transl. his experience from an agnostic negativity into a series of Cath. positives

Helena (1950):

-  = a historical novel

The Loved One (1948)

-  = a fantasia on the eccentricities of CA funerary practices

The Sword of Honour: Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), Unconditional Surrender (1961)

-  = an ambitious trilogy

-  conc.: the disappointing experience of a Cath. patrician as an army officer in WW II

A l d o u s H u x l e y ( 1 8 9 4 - 1 9 6 3 )

-  well-read and self-consciously literary: uses phrases of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton and oth. in his titles

-  conc.: satirical pictures of the self-conscious pursuit of modernity on the part of his characters

Crome Yellow (1921):

-  conc.: a scientific future in which "impersonal generation will take the place of Nature's hideous system"

Antic Hay (1923)

Those Barren Leaves (1925)

Point Counter Point (1928):

-  = "musicalization of fiction"

-  <=> an analogy with musical counterpoint: offers glimpses of diverse experience seemingly observed simultaneously

Brave New World (1932):

-  = his Dystopian masterpiece

-  a challenge to scientific optimism about the future

-  claims that individual freedom is rooted in lit. and religion

-  concl.: the character of Savage chooses the freedom of being unhappy rather than to comply to the controlled sterile scientific world

Eyeless in Gaza (1936):

-  = formally experimental novel

-  incl. difficult unchronological shifts in time and perspective

G r a h a m G r e e n e ( 1 9 0 4 – 9 1 )

L i f e :

-  experienced a singularly unhappy and suicidal adolescence

-  entered the Rom. Church (1926)

W o r k :

-  wrote 26 novels, 9 vol. of short stories, and many miscellaneous articles

-  blamed for seemingly ‘un-English’ prejudices in his time: a semi-devout x but: believing Rom.-Cath., a devout anti-imperialist, and a critic of both Br. and new Am. imperialism

-  recurring themes:

(a)  a colonially wounded world beyond Eur.

(b)  a gloomy sense of sin and moral unworthiness

(c)  a commitment to outsiders and rebels

Ø  1 9 2 0 s – 3 0 s P e r i o d :

The Man Within (1929):

-  the title: from Sir Thomas Browne’s (1605 – 83): ‘There is another man within me that is angry with me.’

-  introd. the recurrent 2-sidedness of his protagonists, complicated by dangerous self-destructiveness

Brighton Rock (1938):

-  the protagonist = Pinkie, a Cath. and a gangster

-  fascinated by the conc. of ‘Hell, Flames, and damnation’ x but: seems to be intent on courting his own eternal destruction in the face of ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’

Ø  1 9 4 0 s – E a r l y 1 9 5 0 s P e r i o d :

-  = his finest work

-  < the WW II > added sharpness to his fictional perspectives and preocc.

-  the angry and self-destructive ‘other man’ moved his fiction in a more distinctively agnostic direction

-  the Cath. Christianity:

(a)  for him: a single ray of heavenly hope over the dark abysses of human depravity, despair, decay, and pain

(b)  for his characters: God and his Church as distant as evidently ‘appallingly strange’

-  characteristic settings: troubled and disorienting topographies

-  characteristic protagonists: Cath., all of them ruins, or at best ruinous

The Power and the Glory (1940):

-  set in the violently restless Mexico

-  the protagonist = a whisky-priest in the anti-clerical Mexico

-  conc. as much with doubt and failure as with faith

-  > enriched the E language with the phrase ‘whisky-priest’

The Ministry of Fear (1943):

-  set in the phantasmagoria world of the twilit, blitzed London

-  incl. the tormented protagonist’s frenetic hallucinations when hiding underground during an air-raid

The Heart of the Matter (1948):

-  set in a flyblown, rat-infested, and war-blighted West Af. colony

-  the protagonist = Scobie, a suicide

-  accuses God of ‘forcing decisions on people’ and blames the Church for having all the answers

The Third Man (1951):

-  set in the precarious, ‘smashed, dreary’, and partly subterranean Vienna

-  the Cath. Vienna, its citizens, its displaced refugees, and its military occupiers = all wrecked, divided, and guilt-ridden

-  > coexists with its more brilliant variant of a film-script written by G. himself

The End of the Affair (1951):

-  set in the blitzed London

“The Destructors”

Ø  L a t e 1 9 5 0 s + P e r i o d :

-  = more ostensibly political novels

-  x but: none of them of quite the same edgy power as his former writing

The Quiet American (1955):

-  set in Vietnam

Our Man in Havana (1958):

-  set in Cuba

The Comedians (1967):

-  > provoked an international scandal: the Haitian Government brought a case against it for is having damaged the Rep.’s tourist trade

A Sort of Life (1977):

-  = an autobiog. memoir

-  claims with a characteristic note of pessimism: ‘Success is only a delayed failure.’

-  x but: achieved both commercial and critical success and became by far the best known and most respected Br. novelist of his generation

I v y C o m p t o n - B u r n e t t ( 1 8 8 4 - 1 9 6 9 )

-  author of 18 novels on similar subjects

-  conc.: an enclosed, circumscribed and dying historical world

-  typical characters: a late Victorian upper middle-class extended family

-  typical setting: a large shabby country house in the pre-WW I period

-  preocc.: oppression and exploitation, power and submission

-  notable for her repres. of conversation: simple, undramatic, determined by the flat good manners of a polite and often repressed society

-  her claustrophobic dialogues are the basis for revealing of deceptions, frauds and often melodramatic surprises on which the novels turn

Pastors and Masters (1925), Brothers and Sisters (1929), Men and Wives (1931), A House and its Head (1935), Parents and Children (1941), Manservant and Maidservant (1947), A Father and his Fate (1957)