704
PARTISAN REVIEW
patriotism is as foreign and strange to virtually everyone he encounters
as a formula in relativity physics, and the view that the war is a lark or
a racket prevails. When, after great difficulty, he succeeds in getting into
an ancient and famous regiment, his fellow soldiers tum out to
be
dis–
oriented eccentrics who behave in the course of their training as if they
were elder statesmen in a lunatic asylum. The point of the satire,
if
there is a point, is that everyone but the hero is silly, inane and asinine.
The hero, by virtue of his nobility, is also silly in that he is naive, always
at a loss and utterly ineffectual. Waugh appears to
be
saying to the
reader: I see the stupidity, foolishness and triviality of human beings
just as much as you do, but I draw a different conclusion; human
be–
ings are ridiculous without religious belief and they are just as ridiculous
when they are possessed by religious belief, but at least when they are
truly religious, they have a touching, pathetic, bewildered quality which
makes possible a little compassion amid one's overwhelming contempt.
If
this is alI that Catholicism means to Waugh, then any old religion and
any old myth would serve as well and as vainly; and since it is all the
meaning it has in his recent novels, no great fantasy is required to read
them as the fiction of an
agent provocateur
in the pay of a society for
the propagation of atheism. And apart from one scene in which the
hero seeks to seduce his former wife, the wonderful bounce and
brio,
the daring and the gaiety of the books which made Waugh justly famous,
have been succeeded by what can only be described as a bored titter.
The Socrates--Socrates indeed!--of
Hemlock and A/ter
is Bernard
Sands, a celebrated English novelist who, having come to see, at last, his
own hypocrisy and corruption-"the shamel Of motives late revealed,
and the awareness/ Of things ill done and done to others' harm/ Which
once you took for exercise of virtue"-makes a disastrous speech on
"the saving power of evil" at the opening of an English Yaddo:
"So
much," he says, "that has been written would have been better left
unprinted"; and he concludes, "I make you a present of the failure of
humanism"; and it is toward this version of nihilism that the entire
story moves. Wilson's theme is thus close to Waugh's in that there
appear to be but two human alternatives: moral ambiguity and self-de–
ception, or moral depravity without compunction. Most of the characters
disgust and all of them depress the author to an extent which is in–
describable. Indeed it is a torment to try to imagine how an author of
Wilson's great gifts, which his previous writings demonstrate, can sus–
tain the desire to write amid such emotions. The reader can hardly
fail to agree with Wilson's attitude toward his characters. But there is no
indication, through the implication of style and point of view, that
